SOURCE: “Beowulf and the Judgement of the Righteous,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 393-407.

When Beowulf utters his last words on earth, the poet comments,

                                                            him of hræðre
gewat
sawol secean                    soðfæstra dom.(1)

(2819b-20)

Despite some critical attempts to find these lines ambiguous, they seem to state unequivocally that the hero's soul has found salvation.² Wiglaf seems equally certain that his lord's soul will find its just reward:

                                                                      Sie sio bær gearo
ædre geæfned,                    þonne we ut cymen,
ond þonne geferian                    frean userne,
leofne mannan,                    þær he longe sceal
on ðæs Waldendes                    wære geðolian.

(3105b-9)

Though Beowulf's other followers, riding about the barrow that is their lord's monument to time, give no testimony as to their belief in his eternal resting-place, they praise him (‘as is fitting’) in terms of impeccable moral qualities, some of which (in particular the assertion that he is ‘manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust’) are used elsewhere in Old English to describe Christ and saintly men.³ Towards the end of the first part of the poem, the narrating voice had praised Beowulf's generosity, loyalty to his lord and companions, and restraint in using the ‘ample gift’ (ginfæstan gife) of his strength (2166b-83a). As he lies dying, the hero himself echoes these remarks, feeling that the Waldend fira will not be able to reckon him among those unrighteous who sought treacherous quarrels, were false to their oaths or murdered their kinsmen (2737-43). Unfortunately for critical consensus, neither the poet nor any of his characters says that Beowulf had not been proud, avaricious or imprudent; and a sizeable number of recent critics, writing about the poet's monument to time, have, in relation to the dragon episode, laid those very charges to his hero's account. Others, in turn, have not been slow in rising to Beowulf's defence, even to seeing him in his last fight as a Christ figure. Interestingly enough, both critics who read the poem literally and those who read it allegorically or exegetically have included both detractors and defenders of Beowulf.⁴

Not uncoincidentally, there are disparate critical views of the Christian poet's attitude towards his poem's pagan heroic world. Some see the poet condemning that world because it necessarily lacks Christ's redeeming grace; some suggest that it is flawed purely as a socio-economic system, where the underpinnings of gift-giving are wars and social instability. Such views find poet and poem stressing the limits of heroism and the heroic world. On the other hand, some critics find the poet celebrating the heroic values of loyalty, courage and generosity, values consistent with his own Christian ethos.⁵

A few critics have been less moralistic. Shippey, for example, concludes that ‘what the poet has done is to create a universe which is lifelike, consistent, a model for emulation, and one seen through a film of antique nostalgia; but which remains at the same time a world the poet and all his contemporaries could properly thank God they did not live in’.⁶ (One may be forgiven for wondering, in light of the second half of that sentence, for whom that universe is ‘a model for emulation’.) Chickering feels that the poet is asking his audience both to admire and to reject the heroic ideal.⁷ Chase suggests that the poet's ‘attitude towards heroic culture … is neither romantic idealizing nor puritan rejection, but a delicate balance of empathy and detachment’.⁸ I am not sure that such contrarieties or balance can coexist comfortably in a work of art, or at least that we can accept them simultaneously. On the other hand, I am not quite ready to accept the ‘heretical’ view tentatively advanced by Douglas Short, that ‘the poet may not have totally harmonized the various aspects of the dragon episode’.⁹ Nor am I at all ready to accept what Tripp calls ‘subtractive rectifications’ of the text of this episode so as to remove inconsistencies and allow Beowulf to emerge ‘as the ideal king he is’.¹⁰ Perhaps there is still room to explore this dominant critical controversy of recent years; and I should like to take this opportunity to offer ofer bronrade some comments on it—both theoretical and substantive—as part of the gombe which this volume pays to Peter Clemoes.

For there to exist such critical disarray in our perceptions of the poem's gestalt and the poet's attitude towards hero and heroic world, there must be what Norman Rabkin, in commenting on a similar state of affairs in Shakespeare studies, calls ‘centers of energy and turbulence’ in the work which we reduce from our several perspectives into ‘coded elements of [different] thematic formula[s]’.¹¹ Of course we recognize that others' perceived thematic designs in Beowulf are ‘either generalized to the point of superficiality, or … [are] too narrow to accommodate large segments of the poem’.¹² That our own formulations may be far from the proper heat and centre of the poet's or the poem's design is, understandably but regrettably, less apparent to us.

It is not difficult to single out three such volatile centres that have produced negative perceptions of the hero. First, there is Hrothgar's sermon: why should he give this cautionary speech to Beowulf at the height of the young hero's triumph over the kin of Cain, if it is not to be a touchstone by which to judge (adversely) Beowulf's behaviour in the later part of the poem? Secondly, as if to justify Hrothgar's admonition, we find Beowulf's ‘prideful’ and ‘avaricious’ speech of lines 2518b-37, in which he asserts that the battle against the dragon is his responsibility alone, and that he will either win the gold or die in the attempt. And third comes Wiglaf's speech of lines 3077-109, in which Beowulf's young kinsman says that now the Geats must suffer anes willan, ‘for the sake of one’, that despite all their advice to shun the dragon their lord heold on heahgesceap: here Beowulf's imprudence or obstinacy is made manifest by his own liegeman, a view seemingly reinforced by the messenger's prophecy that Franks and Frisians, or Swedes, will swoop down upon the Geats once the word spreads that their lord is dead.

It is less easy to find in the text itself such centres as suggest that the poet is at all antipathetic to the ethical or social values of the heroic world he depicts. The poet is a Christian, true, and he specifically condemns the heathen practice of praying to the gastbona for help, a practice which (as he says) assigns one's soul to the fire's embrace. But this custom is mentioned and condemned only once, in lines 175-88; is it enough to sustain the weight of 3182 lines? Though the Geats (as well as the Danes) were historically heathens—and Beowulf is a Geat—they are in no way so stigmatized. The argument that the poem's heroic world and its protagonist are flawed because they lack Christ's redeeming grace is really one ex silentio. Even the Christian excursus makes no mention of Christ's redemptive power, or of Christ for that matter. The God who governs human and seasonal edwenden in the geardagum of the narrative setting still rules such change, the ‘authenticating voice’ reiterates, in the poet's own time.¹³ The argument that there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of heroic society, in that a hero-king, who behaves (as he must) with pride and action rather than with discretion and mensura, is a liability to his people, ultimately has to admit that ‘abstract comments on pride in a king are to be found, not in Beowulf, but in early medieval works on kingship’¹⁴—again an appeal outside the text. The rather different argument that the hero-king who is so good in his rôle usurps the capacity for action from his warriors (hence Beowulf's desertion by his retainers), and thus suggests the limits of heroic society, depends on an assumed causal relationship never made in the poem between two facts.¹⁵ And so forth.

On the other hand, John D. Niles, by closely examining Wiglaf's speech about the cowardice of the retainers, has recently made anew a case for the poet's approval of the heroic ethos. His conclusion is worth quoting:

If the society portrayed in Beowulf is weak, its weakness can be ascribed to the too-frequent failure of people to live by the ethics that, when put into practice, hold society together. The fatal contradiction developed through the narrative of Beowulf is nothing inherent in heroic society, feudal society, capitalist or Marxist society, or any other social system. It is lodged within the recalcitrant breasts of human beings who in times of crisis find themselves unable to live up to the ideals to which their lips give assent. The poem does not criticize the hero for being unlike the Geats. It criticizes all of us for not being more like the hero.¹⁶

If by this time I seem to suggest that I believe the Christian poet looked with kindly eye on his heroic world and saw its ethical and social values (even if not its religious ones) as consonant and coextensive with his own, that is so. If I also give the impression that I perceive King Beowulf as flawed by pride, avarice or imprudence, that is not so. My view is that the poet has presented both the hero and his world with more humanitas than Christianitas; that to make us feel lacrimae rerum in his hero's death, he has humanized the ‘marvellous’ (or monstrous) Beowulf by making him fallible in judgement (his only flaw) and historicized his world so that we, the audience, are better able to empathize with the tragic situation, to suffer with Wiglaf and the Geats, even as we stand in awe of the hero who held to his high fate.¹⁷

As to the poet's attitude towards the heroic ethos, there can be no doubt that he finds loyalty among kin and retainers highly praiseworthy. Consider, for example, the ‘voice's’ gnomic wisdom in lines 2600b-1 and 2708b-9a: ‘sibb æfre ne mæg / wiht onwendan þam ðe wel þenceð’ and ‘swylc sceolde secg wesan, / ðegn æt ðearfe!’. The heroic ideal of generosity or gift-giving and the value of treasure have, on the other hand, been much disputed. I have had my say elsewhere about the place of gold in the scheme of Beowulf: that the poet praises the giving, faults the hoarding.¹⁸ There I observed that ‘the contention of critics who would interpret the gold as a temptation to sin and an invitation to spiritual damnation … rest[s] … on presumed parallels between Beowulf and exegetical commentary, based on the assumption of a tacit understanding between poet and audience as to how to listen to or read poetry¹⁹—that is, it too is an argument not based on the text. In that essay, however, I conceded that the gnomic passage of lines 2764b-6 was something of a stumbling block for my interpretation:

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

I could only suggest then that they did not have the same explicit Christian pointing of lines 100-2 of The Seafarer and, more tentatively, that they could be omitted (as a possible interpolation) without disturbing at all the metrical contour of the lines in which they are embedded. Now I think there is a better idea.

All the other gnomic or semi-gnomic passages in the second part of the poem (nine made by the ‘voice’ and two by Wiglaf, as I see them)²⁰ arise from and are ‘natural’ concomitants of the action that has been or is being described: they blend that action into universal traditional truth. The usual translation of this passage, with oferhigian as ‘tempt’ or ‘overpower’ and hyde as either ‘hide’ or ‘heed’, is quite at odds with the action being described: Wiglaf is viewing the treasure hoard at the command of Beowulf, and is in no way being tempted or overpowered by it, now or later. In line with the other gnomic comments, these words should be universalizing the exposure of the treasure. Peter Clemoes has astutely observed that Anglo-Saxon art, as well as Beowulf, ‘shows insight into inner forces’, and as one example in the poem he cites lines 864b-5:

                                                            hleapan leton,
on geflit faran                    fealwe mearas.

‘The men’, he comments, ‘allowed their steeds to exert their natural tendency, identified as a certain kind of movement (hleapan) and as movement in competition (on geflit faran).’²¹ With these considerations in mind, I think Niles's translation of the gnomic passage quoted above has much to recommend it:

Given the context of the passage, I take oferhigian rather in the sense of “outsmart.” The treasure is just about to be brought out into the light, despite the efforts of a previous tribe of men to keep it hidden in the earth forever. Hydan means “hide,” as it should. The lines amount to no more than a brief aside concerning the futility of burying riches: “Treasure, gold in the ground, can easily outsmart anyone, no matter who hides it!” This is essentially the reading of Bosworth and Toller, s.v. “oferhigian.”²²

This reading makes the passage consistent in kind and context with other such passages, reveals the inner force of treasure (compare below my comment on lifað, of the treasure, in 3167b), and reinforces the anti-hoarding theme of Hrothgar's sermon and of elsewhere in the poem.

That the poet has no quarrel with the heroic ideal of revenge may also be debatable. Yet we know the ideal or practice was not interdicted in Anglo-Saxon Christian England, and was even in some cases encouraged.²³ The Beowulf poet clearly approves of God's revenge on Cain's descendants in lines 111-14 and on the giants who ‘behaved badly’ in lines 1688-93. In human feuds he seems to distinguish between rightful actions and unrihte ones. Hygelac's Frisian raid was evidently one of the latter:

syþðan he for wlenco                    wean ahsode,
fæhðe to Frysum.

(1206-7a)

But Beowulf's revenge on Onela for the Swedish king's killing of Heardred seems to have the poet's tacit approbation, to judge from the tone of lines 2391-6 (and, additionally, from 2390b, ‘ðæt wæs god cyning’, if that verse refers to Beowulf rather than to Onela). Surely the poet does not fault Beowulf's revenge on Grendel and Grendel's mother; nor does he, I think, fault the hero's revenge on the dragon when he simply states: ‘him ðæs guðcyning, / Wedera þioden wræce leornode’ (2335b-6).

A further adverse judgement on the poem's heroic world is embodied in the concept of ‘social guilt’: feuds and violence are inevitable in a society where gifts must be obtained from someone in order to be given to others as rewards. Thus leaders, especially kings, need to perform deeds of derring-do for the acquisition of material treasures, but in so doing they make bad kings, exposing themselves to death and leaving their people leaderless. A subtle argument, drawn (as Shippey observes) ‘from comparative considerations of Beowulf, Hrothgar, Hygelac’, and encouraged by the ‘interlace’ structure of the poem. We

think that the poet is demonstrating the inadequacy of heroic society; that he sees this the more forcibly for being a Christian; and that his rejection of overt finger-pointing first gives [us] the pleasure of ironic perception, and second shows [us] the glittering insidiousness of heroism, the way it perverts even the best of intentions. This whole approach offers evidently attractive baits, propounding an interesting sociological thesis, rejecting the cult of violence, and making it possible to give the poet immense credit for conscious artistry.²⁴

But as with the exegetical critics' approach, this view finds no confirmation in the text: it rests on our sense of the poet's perspective, on unproven and unprovable ironies that may well be more modern than medieval.

In turning from consideration of the perspective on the heroic ethos in Beowulf to the view of the hero himself, we find, I think, equally tenuous rationales for negative gestalten. A brief examination of a short passage in what has been called ‘the most influential [essay] in expressing the pejorative view of the hero and heroic society’²⁵ may not be amiss, for the ways of argument therein can tell us something more about the difficulties of evidential practices and about the questionability of adverse judgements of the hero. This analysis will lead into my own (I hope not so tenuous) arguments for a Beowulf who, in the dragon episode, may be fallible in judgement but is otherwise unexceptionable.

Discussing this episode, Leyerle says that Beowulf ‘undertakes precipitant action … the last of the foolhardy deeds attributed to him by Wiglaf’.²⁶ The passage in question is the following:

                                                                                hlaford us
þis ellenweorc                    ana aðohtè
to gefremmane,                    folces hyrde,
forðam he manna mæst                    mærða gefremede,
dæda dollicra,

(2642b-6a)

Why is Beowulf's undertaking called foolhardy, we may ask? Why, indeed, is it the last of such deeds? There has been no suggestion of a series of foolhardy deeds in the poem. Beowulf's only action that qualifies for this epithet is his swimming match with Breca, which he admits was a foolish, youthful undertaking. Leyerle seems to have seized on the word dollicra in the passage he quotes (though he does not say so), since dollice in other contexts means something like that. But dæda dollicra is in variation with mærða, which in turn goes back to ellenweorc—and these terms are anything but pejorative. Whatever the normal meaning of dollice, it must have a favourable sense in this series; and we can find support for Klaeber's suggested gloss ‘audacious, daring’ (more consonant with the tenor of Wiglaf's speech) in the term dolsceaða (479a) used by Hrothgar when he says of Grendel's reign of terror ‘God eaþe mæg / þone dolsceaða dæda getwæfan!’—hardly ‘foolhardy-ravager’. The fact that dol-and dæd are in alliterative coupling in both lines suggests that the force of formulaic composition may be more powerful than ‘normal’ word-meaning. The pressure of the hermeneutic circle, I suspect, led Leyerle to the use of this rather dubious bit of evidence.²⁷

So too in Leyerle's next paragraph:

[Beowulf] disdains the use of an adequate force against the dragon:

Oferhogode ða                    hringa fengel,
þæt he þone widflogan                    weorode gesohte,
sidan herge.

(2345-7a)

The verb oferhogode echoes Hrothgar's words oferhygda dæl (1740) and oferhyda ne gym (1760).

In this argument verbal echo from within the poem is used to suggest that, indeed, Beowulf is exemplifying precisely that pride and disdain against which Hrothgar had warned the young hero. But if we look at what Hrothgar is actually saying, we find that the oferhygd he cautions against, in both lines 1740 and 1760, is connected with greed, with hoarding, with failure of generosity in gift-giving, and not with scorning to have help in battle. In fact, the poet goes on to point out, in the first historical digression of the second part of the poem, that Beowulf has plenty of past credentials to support his decision to move against the dragon:

                                                            forðon he ær fela
nearo neðende                    niða gedigde,
hildehlemma …

(2349b-51a)

This passage, incidentally, would seem to disprove the arguments of the many critics who think that King Beowulf's fifty years of keeping the peace (2732a-6a) means he engaged in no human battle clashes.²⁸

Lines 1760b-1a might, I suppose, be taken, by changing Klaeber's punctuation, with the verses that follow, ‘Nu is þines blæd / ane hwile’; and many critics have also seemed to think that old King Beowulf, like the aged Hrothgar, suffered a decline in his fortitudo. But, whereas the Danish king is explicitly characterized in 1886b-7a as one whom old age has deprived of the joys of strength, no such observation is made about Beowulf. We should notice that he still has that mægen that overtaxes any sword (2682b-7)—it is surely not a failure in human strength that causes Nægling to break (2680b)! Once again we should recognize that Hrothgar's cautionary comments do not really apply to the Beowulf of the second part of the poem, except for his final generalization about mortality: ‘semninga bið, / þæt þec, dryhtguma, deað oferswyðeð’ (1767b-7).²⁹

Thus far I have tried to indicate that Hrothgar's sermon is no touchstone for a negatively portrayed Beowulf of later days. Let me consider now more briefly the two other ‘centers of energy and turbulence’ I mentioned earlier.

Beowulf's speech in which he declares he will fight the dragon alone and gain the gold (2518b-37) is the first of these. Since I have considered this previously, I shall only refer the reader to that discussion.³⁰ The second ‘centre’ is a combination of Wiglaf's speech in lines 3077-109 with his messenger's preceding harangue in lines 2900-3027. In reviewing this locus, we had best include all the speeches, in order, after Beowulf dies and his soul seeks soðfæstra dom. When the cowards creep out of the woods and approach Wiglaf, he looks at the unleofe, comments that Beowulf threw away the wargear he had equipped them with, and says further that they shall henceforth forgo

                                        sincþego                    ond swyrdgifu,
eall eðelwyn                    eowrum cynne,
…
…                    syððan æðelingas
feorran gefricgean                    fleam eowerne,
domleasan dæd.                    Deað bið sella …

(2884-5 and 2888b-90)

Then Wiglaf orders his messenger to announce the sad news to the waiting Geats; in his speech the messenger twice states that a time of war and revenge is inevitable once Franks and Frisians on the one hand and Swedes on the other learn of Beowulf's death. Some lines later, after the poet has told about the curse on the gold, Wiglaf again speaks (3077-109) and this time seems to accuse Beowulf of obstinacy in seeking the dragon, of not listening to all their advice for him to leave the dragon alone. From the inconsistencies in these accounts, a critic can select the evidence for either a positive or a negative view of the hero's actions—and so critics have done. Can all the evidence, including the difficult curse on the gold, be accounted for in a unified pattern?

That evidence, it seems to me, leads to an emphasis on fate and the interlacing threads that comprise human and societal doom and dom, ‘glory’: the retainers' cowardice that leads to their lord's death, the fact of their lord's death (one would hardly expect the messenger, who must be one of the cowards, to stress his and his comrades' failure to live up to their oaths of allegiance),³¹ a force beyond human comprehension (the curse), and a hero's (proper) refusal to abide by his counsellors' (timid) advice to sidestep the dragon's challenge. Wiglaf sums all this up, it should be noted, not by blaming Beowulf for violating kingly mensura but, in a tight stylistic ‘envelope’ that emphasizes the combination of human will and ‘determinism’ in Beowulf's fate, he says:

Heold on heahgesceap;                    hord ys gesceawod,
grimme gegangen;                    wæs þæt gifeðe
to swið,
þe þone [þeodcyning]                    þyder ontyhte.

(3084-6; my italics)

We may recall young Beowulf's recognition of a similar juxtaposition of human and superhuman in his account of the Breca match, when a sea monster drew him to the depths:

                                                                                                    hwæþre me gyfeðe wearþ,
þæt ic aglæcan                    orde geræhte,
hildebille;                    heaþoræs fornam
mihtig meredeor                    þurh mine hand.

(555b-8)

And the poet's own comment with regard to Beowulf's success in his fight with Grendel's mother:

                                                                      ond halig God
geweold wigsigor;                    witig Drihten,
rodera Rædend                    hit on ryht gesced
yðelice,                    syþðan he eft astod.

(1553b-5)

What the Beowulf poet thereby achieves in his poem is a miracle of the highest tragic art, wherein man's fate is balanced between his own human will and the power of forces beyond his control. We do not draw practical moral lessons about human behaviour from Oedipus or King Lear; nor should we scan Beowulf either as a mirror for princes or a reverse mirror-image of unkingly or sinful action.

That the hoard grimme gegangen is reburied in the earth,

                                                                      þær hit nu gen lifað
eldrum swa unnyt,                    swa hi(t æro)r wæs,

(3167b-8)

is something of a small centre of energy and turbulence for interpretation too. The poet does not explicitly say why it is reburied, but the fact that it will be given back to earth is first mentioned by the messenger in lines 3010b-17, after he has finished saying that the reasons he has just adduced (old feuds) will lead to resumption of ‘sio fæhðo ond se feondscipe’, and advised the Geats to hurry to see their dead lord, ‘þe us beagas geaf’ (3009b). The most likely inferences to be drawn from this juxtaposition are, first, that Beowulf deserves the hoard as a measure of his greatness, and, secondly, that the Geats (by their cowardice and dim prospects for the future) are unworthy of it. I do not recall anyone's having commented on the poet's use of the word lifað in 3167b, a strange word applied to gold, and one rendered by most translators, including myself, as ‘remains’ or the like. Perhaps the verb is being used in ironic contrast to the dead Beowulf and the soon-to-perish Geats? Perhaps the whole clause suggests that gold has a life of its own: it will reveal itself to those who fight for it (see the gnomic passage considered above) or to those who have God's grace (the thief; lines 3054b-7), but it will live, useless to those who have not the fortitude in mod and mægen to subjugate its life to their own will. Whatever the case, one sure effect of the comment is to make Beowulf's dying remark that he is glad to have won the gold for his people (2794-8) seem impercipient indeed; and this irony leads me to the final argument of this paper: that whatever negative impulse throbs through the dragon episode results from the humanization of the hero.

The terms of disapprobation which critics have applied to King Beowulf's behaviour in the dragon fight are all judgemental: proud, avaricious, obstinate, imprudent, rash etc. My term ‘fallible (in understanding or perception of events)’ carries no such connotations. What I am suggesting is that the hero, who by his very nature has something of the monstrous or marvellous in him,³² is here made more human, so that the audience will react to his death more feelingly. Not a decline in his fortitudo, as I have argued above, but in his sapientia: not in what he does, but in what he perceives. And with this humanization the Geatish world he now moves in becomes more historicized than the Danish one of his exploits against the Grendel-kin.

My first remarks will be on the historicization. Attempts to link the Cain-descended monsters of the first part of the poem with the dragon, to see the wyrm or draca as a satanic figure that is somehow the progeny of Cain, or to see the dragon's feud in the perspective of the scriptural ‘Great Feud’ between God and his enemies, will not bear close scrutiny.³³ For all the beast's pyrotechnics, the dragon's world, if we can call the setting and action in the latter part of the poem by that term, has no suggestions such as ‘Godes yrre bær’ (711b—of Grendel), or of a wondrous light shining like heaven's candle (1570-2a—after Beowulf defeats Grendel's mother). To say that the poet had ‘no need for further scriptural reference after the two kinfolk of Cain have been destroyed’³⁴ is begging the question, an admission that there is no textual evidence for the position being argued; but when the same critic continues with ‘we have had Hrothgar's warning that calamity continues to come unexpected upon mankind: strife is always renewed’, we can agree with what precedes the colon, but find no evidence that Hrothgar says what follows it (and we note that the following sentence of additional ‘evidence’ points outside the text to the ‘Exeter Book maximist’). When we read further that ‘the advent of another adversary of mankind is inevitable’, we may note that although Grendel is called feond mancynnes and mancynnes feond (164a and 1276a) and Godes andsaca(n) (786b and 1682b), the dragon has a rather different set of terms for his designation: eald uhtsceaða (2271a), ðeodsceaða (2278a and 2688a), guðsceaða (2318a), gearo guðfreca (2414a), mansceaða (2514b) and attorsceaða (2839a). The dragon wears his adversarial nature with at least an epithetical difference.

The human feuds in the latter part of the poem are likewise more down-to-earth, more historical than legendary. I have explored elsewhere the force and place of ‘history’ in providing an epic sense of destiny in this part of the poem,³⁵ and shall not repeat myself here. This historical world is appropriate for, and lends credence to, Beowulf's humanity.

Beowulf's fallibility is exhibited most obviously in the discrepancy I have already touched on. That discrepancy cannot simply be an inconsistency of the kind Niles cogently argues for as ‘the truncated motif’ of the ‘barbaric style’ in which the poem is composed³⁶—and Niles does not suggest it is such. It must be meant to indicate that the dying Beowulf no longer has the perspicacity he had when he told Hygelac about Freawaru's proposed marriage to Ingeld: he cannot see that his retainers' cowardice will render the treasure useless to his people. This failure is not surprising, perhaps, in view of the fact that Beowulf has always, by virtue of his marvellous abilities, acted alone. Whether his men draw their swords and hack futilely at a charmed-skin Grendel, or wait helplessly by the mere's edge, or flee precipitously into the woods, Beowulf has never counted on them. Even in human battles he seems to have been ‘ana on orde’ (2498b). No wonder, then, that he says the battle against the dragon is his responsibility alone, and that he cannot now understand the impact of his followers' treachery upon the Geats' future. There is irony here no doubt, but hardly of a judgemental kind. Rather, by Beowulf's fallible understanding we are made to feel the pathos of his self-sacrifice for a nation that cannot profit thereby.

But Beowulf has also misjudged with respect to the ‘measure’ of the battle, for the man who is his kinsman and retainer does help him defeat the foe ‘ofer min gemet’, as he says (2879a). The very notion that Beowulf can be helped this time further humanizes him. That the dragon is a more ‘natural’ phenomenon than the Grendel-kin, unassociated with Cain or the Great Feud, is consonant with Wiglaf's being able to help, and creates an irony in that this time, when his followers could have helped the hero, they flee. The dying king misjudges again when he believes that Wiglaf can look after his people's needs: both Wiglaf's and his messenger's speeches point up that miscalculation. He who when young had the wisdom to suggest tactfully that Hrothgar's son Hrethric, if he were a worthy heir apparent, might go abroad while a threat to his succession existed (1836-9), now cannot perceive that no ordinary mortal, even one who has fought beyond his measure, is qualified to keep old enemies at bay in the face of the Geat's manifest weakness. How like in (fallible) judgement to us all the epic hero has become, despite his still imposing stature!

This falling-off in Beowulf's ‘situational’ grasp is revealed at the very start of the dragon episode when the hero, seeing his gifstol razed, thinks he may have offended God ‘ofer ealde riht’ (2330a). The audience, however, knows that his perception of the situation is wrong, that the monster has been loosed because of the cup's theft; and of course Beowulf later learns ‘hwanan sio fæhð aras’ (2403b). Though Beowulf has the wisdom to recognize that he will need an iron shield as protection against the dragon's flames, he seems unaware that the bone of the beast's skull is less vulnerable to penetration than its softer underbelly; whereas, for all his inexperience, Wiglaf has the shrewdness to strike lower down.

I shall mention but one further piece of evidence which suggests that old Beowulf but slenderly knows the score/ In accounting for his life, in summing up his record as king, he says, among other things:

                                                                      Ic on earde bad
mælgesceafta,                    heold min tela,
ne sohte searoniðas,                    ne me swor fela
aða on unriht.

(2736b-9a)

Three hundred and more lines later, the poet comments that Beowulf, like other mortals, did not know how his death would come about:

                                                            þa he biorges weard
sohte searoniðas.

(3066b-7a)

The formulaic repetition is startling. Is this just a case of non-significant formularity, or is the poet suggesting a further limit on his hero's percipience? Beowulf is obviously referring to human relations in giving his righteous reckoning, but the poet seems to indicate that his seeking out of the dragon was also a searonið, and the cause of his worulde gedal. I realize that this evidence can be interpreted otherwise to support the arguments of those who would see Beowulf as acting improperly in seeking out the dragon; but it, too, is a centre of energy and turbulence that should not be discounted or overlooked.

The reading I have proposed on the controversy over the hero and his world has tried to encompass the most relevant evidence on both sides, and to avoid the pitfalls of the hermeneutic circle (as much as possible) in argumentation. I am not that sanguine about my success on both scores. But I believe my reading is as plausible as any. One can comprehend a Beowulf whose actions in the latter part of the poem reveal him to be a peerless hero still—and action, as Peter Clemoes has observed, defines the agent in this poem³⁷—even as his sapiential vulnerability in his final confrontation demarvellizes (rather than indicts) him. The poet has forthrightly placed his hero's soul among those seeking the judgement of the righteous, but has not suggested that the audience judge him self-righteously. Rather, I believe, by revealing a weakness in the aged Beowulf he has somewhat humanized his hero's nature, making him easier of empathetic access to an audience's sensibilities. He helps thus awaken in the reader or listener ‘a poignancy, a pathos … [which] springs from epic's presentation of man's accomplishments against the background of his mortality, from the implication the hero's fall entails for his people, from a sense of futility in the splendid achievement, a resignation and despair in the face of the limits of life’.³⁸ The Christian poet, indeed, sees, and aesthetically achieves, a continuity between the geardagas of the poem's heroic world and the windagas (1062) of his own time.³⁹Life has its limits, not heroism or the heroic world: this, I think, might have been his answer to Alcuin's abiding question, ‘Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?’.⁴⁰

Notes

1. All quotations are from Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. F. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston, Mass., 1950).

2. See, e.g., E. G. Stanley, ‘Hæþenra Hyht in Beowulf’, Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. S. B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oreg., 1963), pp. 142-3, for a denial of Beowulf's salvation. See J. D. Niles, Beowulf: the Poem and its Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 297, n. 11, for citations to the contrary.

3. See M. P. Richards, ‘A Reexamination of Beowulf ll. 3180-3182’, ELN 10 (1973), 163-7.

4. For a summary of bibliography on these positions, see D. D. Short, ‘Beowulf and Modern Critical Tradition’, A Fair Day in the Affections: Literary Essays in Honor of Robert B. White, Jr, ed. J. D. Durant and M. T. Hester (Raleigh, NC, 1980), pp. 1-22, esp. 9-14.

5. For the first of these views, see, e.g., R. W. Hanning, ‘Beowulf as Heroic History’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 5 (1974), 77-102; for the second, see H. Berger, Jr, and H. M. Leicester, Jr, ‘Social Structure as Doom: the Limits of Heroism in Beowulf’, Old English Studies in Honor of John C. Pope, ed. R. B. Burlin and E. B. Irving, Jr (Toronto, 1974), pp. 37-79; and for the third, see Niles, Beowulf, pp. 235-47.

6. T. A. Shippey, Beowulf (London, 1978), p. 44.

7. H. D. Chickering, Jr, Beowulf: a Dual-Language Edition (Garden City, NY, 1977), pp. 26-7.

8. C. Chase, ‘Saints’ Lives, Royal Lives, and the Date of Beowulf’, The Dating of Beowulf, ed. C. Chase (Toronto, 1981), pp. 161-71, at 161-2.

9. Short, ‘Beowulf and Modern Critical Tradition’, p. 11.

10. R. P. Tripp, Jr, More About the Fight with the Dragon: Beowulf 2208b-3182, Commentary, Edition, and Translation (Lanham, Md, 1983), p. ix.

11. N. Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, Ill., 1981), p. 25.

12. Short, ‘Beowulf and Modern Critical Tradition’, p. 9.

13. See my essay ‘The Authenticating Voice in Beowulf’, ASE 5 (1976), 51-62, at 55-7.

14. J. Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, Mæ 34 (1965), 89-102, at 98.

15. Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure’, pp. 64-5.

16. Niles, Beowulf, p. 247.

17. On Beowulf's ‘marvellous’ or monstrous nature, see my essay ‘A Touch of the Monstrous in the Hero, or Beowulf Re-Marvellized’, ES 63 (1982), 294-300, and Niles, Beowulf, pp. 3-30. Obviously I am disagreeing with Niles, however, when he says (p. 29): ‘In the end, the audience … cannot really identify itself with Beowulf the man … We know too little of his everyday humanity, his normal human feelings and weaknesses, to be able to see him as an extension of ourselves.’

18. S. B. Greenfield, ‘“Gifstol” and Goldhoard in Beowulf’, Old English Studies in Honor of John C. Pope, ed. Burlin and Irving, pp. 107-17.

19. Ibid. p. 115.

20. The nine by the ‘voice’ are lines 2275b-7, 2291-3a, 2514b, 2590b-1, 2600-1, 2708b-9a, 2858-9, 3062b-5 and 3174b-7; the two by Wiglaf are lines 2890b-1 and 3077-8. Some of these are discussed T. A. Shippey, ‘Maxims in Old English Narrative: Literary Art or Traditional Wisdom?’, Oral Tradition, Literary Tradition: a Symposium, ed. H. Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense, 1977), pp. 28-46.

21. P. Clemoes, ‘Action in Beowulf and our Perception of it’, Old English Poetry: Essays on Style, ed. D. G. Calder (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), pp. 147-68, at 155.

22. Niles, Beowulf, p. 299, n. 6.

23. See D. Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, 1952), pp. 31-3.

24. Shippey, Beowulf, pp. 37-8.

25. Short ‘Beowulf and Modern Critical Tradition’, p. 10; the essay is Leyerle's (cited above, n. 14).

26. Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero’, p. 95.

27. I would add that I find no evidence at all in Hrothgar's sermon for Leyerle's contention that the king's speech ‘is, in part, a caution against headlong action’ (‘Beowulf the Hero’, p. 97; my italics). The only possible referent for Leyerle's remark is Heremod's killing of his table companions; but this action is hardly on the same level as fighting a dragon to revenge one's people and gain treasure for them.

28. Cf. lines 2391-6. Note that Beowulf had survived many battle clashes since he had cleansed Hrothgar's hall (2351b-4a). This is clearly not a reference to further monster battles. Lines 2391-6 refer specifically to Beowulf's military support of Eadgils against Onela. Niles is the latest to overlook such evidence; see his Beowulf, pp. 252 and 304, n. 5, for bibliographic references to others of like mind.

29. Beowulf's oferhygd is often compared to that of Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon and that of Roland; but neither of the latter destroys his enemy by his self-sacrifice.

30. ‘“Gifstol” and Goldhoard’ (cited above, n. 18).

31. Still, the messenger echoes Wiglaf's comment about no more treasure-giving by indicating that all the hard-won treasure will be buried with Beowulf (3010b-17).

32. See above, n. 17.

33. On the former, see, e.g., my review of D. Williams, Cain and Beowulf: a Study in Secular Allegory (Toronto, 1982) in MP 81 (1983), 191-4. The ‘Great Feud’ perspective has been advanced by M. Osborn, ‘The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf’, PMLA 93 (1978), 973-81.

34. Osborn, ‘The Great Feud’, p. 979.

35. S. B. Greenfield, ‘Geatish History: Poetic Art and Epic Quality in Beowulf’, Neophilologus 47 (1963), 211-17.

36. Niles, Beowulf, pp. 167-76.

37. Clemoes, ‘Action in Beowulf’, esp. pp. 155-60.

38. S. B. Greenfield, ‘Beowulf and Epic Tragedy’, Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Greenfield, p. 104.

39. Cf. above, n. 13.

40. I should like to express my appreciation to Daniel G. Calder and Thelma N. Greenfield for their most helpful comments in the shaping of this paper.

Abbreviations

AAe: Archaeologia Aeliana

AB: Analecta Bollandiana

AntJ: Antiquaries Journal

ArchJ: Archaeological Journal

ASC: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

ASE: Anglo-Saxon England

ASNSL: Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

ASPR: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 1931-42)

BAR: British Archaeological Reports, British series (Oxford)

BGDSL: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur [Bollandists], Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1899-1901)

BL: British Library manuscript

BN: Bibliothèque Nationale

CA: Current Archaeology

CCSL: Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout)

CM: Continuatio Mediaevalis

CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna)

EEMF: Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (Copenhagen)

EETS: Early English Text Society

e.s.: extra series

o.s. original series

s.s.: supplementary series

EHD: D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents c. 500-1042, 2nd ed. (London, 1979)

EHR: English Historical Review

ELN: English Language Notes

EPNS: English Place-Name Society

ES: English Studies

FS: Frühmittelalterliche Studien

HBS: Henry Bradshaw Society Publications

HE: Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum

JBAA: Journal of the British Archaeological Association

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

JEH: Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JTS: Journal of Theological Studies

Mæ: Medium ævum

MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Auct. antiq.: Auctores antiquissimi

Epist.: Epistolae Aevi Carolini

Epist. select.: Epistolae selectae

PLAC: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini

Script.: Scriptores

Script. rer.Meroving.: Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum

MLR: Modern Language Review

MP: Modern Philology

MS: Mediaeval Studies

NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen

N&Q: Notes & Queries

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

OEN: Old English Newsletter

PBA: Proceedings of the British Academy

PL: Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1841-64)

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

RB: Revue bénédictine

RHE: Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique

SM: Studi medievali

SN: Studia Neophilologica

TPS: Transactions of the Philological Society

YAJ: Yorkshire Archaeological Journal

ZDA: Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum