Beowulf actually predicts this turn of events when he goes back to his own country after saving the Danes (for the time being, at any rate) by staving off the two ‘reavers from hell’. In the hall of his ‘ring-giver’, Hygelac, lord of the Geats, the hero discourses about his adventures in a securely fortified cliff-top enclosure. But this security is only temporary, for it is the destiny of the Geat people to be left lordless in the end. Hygelac’s alliances eventually involve him in deadly war with the Swedish king, Ongentheow, and even though he does not personally deliver the fatal stroke (two of his thanes are responsible for this – see lines 2484–9 and then the lengthier reprise of this incident at lines 2922–3003), he is known in the poem as ‘Ongentheow’s killer’. Hence it comes to pass that after the death of Beowulf, who eventually succeeds Hygelac, the Geats experience a great foreboding and the poem closes in a mood of sombre expectation. A world is passing away, the Swedes and others are massing on the borders to attack and there is no lord or hero to rally the defence.
The Swedes, therefore, are the third nation whose history and destiny are woven into the narrative, and even though no part of the main action is set in their territory, they and their kings constantly stalk the horizon of dread within which the main protagonists pursue their conflicts and allegiances. The Swedish dimension gradually becomes an important element in the poem’s emotional and imaginative geography, a geography that entails, it should be said, no clear map-sense of the world, more an apprehension of menaced borders, of danger gathering beyond the mere and the marshes, of mearc-stapas ‘prowling the moors, huge marauders / from some other world’.
Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here are heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture; the duguþ share the mead-benches with the geogoþ, the veterans with their tales of warrior-kings and hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders with young braves – þegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers – keen to win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glorious name in the wœl-rœs (the rush of battle-slaughter), the pride of defending one’s lord and bearing heroic witness to the integrity of the bond between him and his hall-companions – a bond sealed in the gl
o
and gidd of peace-time feasting and ring-giving – this is what
gave drive and sanction to the Germantic warrior-culture enshrined in
Beowulf. Heorot and Hygelac’s hall are the hubs of this value system upon which the poem’s action turns. But there is another, outer rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one that has not been altogether shed but that has now been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and legends that his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the port can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowedAt the same time, as a result of his inherited vernacular culture and the imaginative sympathy that distinguishes him as an artist, the poet can lend the full weight of his rhetorical power to Beowulf as he utters the first principles of the northern warrior’s honour-code:
Offerings to idols, swore oaths
That the killer of souls might come to their aid
And save the people. That was their way,
Their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
They remembered hell.
[175–80]
It is always betterIn an age when ‘the instability of the human subject’ is constantly argued for if not presumed, there should be no problem with a poem that is woven from two such different psychic fabrics. In fact, Beowulf perfectly answers the early modern conception of a work of creative imagination as one in which conflicting realities find accommodation within a new order; and this reconciliation occurs, it seems to me, most poignantly and most profoundly in the poem’s third section, once the dragon enters the picture and the hero in old age must gather his powers for the final climactic ordeal. From the moment Beowulf advances under the crags, into the comfortless arena bounded by the rock-wall, the reader knows he is one of those ‘marked by fate’. The poetry is imbued with a strong intuition of wyrd hovering close, ‘unknowable but certain’, and yet, because it is imagined within a consciousness that has learned to expect that the soul will find an ultimate home ‘among the steadfast ones’, this primal human emotion has been transmuted into something less ‘zero at the bone’, more metaphysically tempered.
To avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
Means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
Win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.
[1384–9]
A similar transposition from a plane of regard that is, as it were, helmeted and hall-bound to one that sees things in a slightly more heavenly light is discernible in the different ways the poet imagines gold. Gold is a constant element, gleaming solidly in the underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the arms and regalia of warriors on the mead-benches. It is loaded into boats as spoil, handed out in bent bars as hall-gifts, buried in the earth as treasure, persisting underground as an affirmation of a people’s glorious past and an elegy for it. It pervades the ethos of the poem and adds luster to its diction. And yet the bullion with which Waels’s son Sigemund weighs down the hold after an earlier dragon-slaying triumph (in the old days, long before Beowulf’s time) is a more trustworthy substance than that which is secured behind the walls of Beowulf’s barrow. By the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals the riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt. It is l
ne, transitory,
passing from hand to hand, and its changed status is registered as a symptom
of the changed world. Once the dragon is disturbed, the melancholy and
sense of displacement that pervade the last movement of the poem enter
the hoard as a disabling and ominous light. And the dragon himself, as
a genius of the older order, is bathed in this light, so that even as
he begins to stir, the reader has a premonition that the days of his empery
are numbered.Nevertheless, the dragon has a wonderful inevitability about him and a unique glamour. It is not that the other monsters are lacking in presence and aura; it is more that they remain, for all their power to terrorize, creatures of the physical world. Grendel comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and immensely strong android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite. And while his mother too has a definite brute-bearing about her, a creature of slouch and lunge on land if seal-swift in the water, she nevertheless retains a certain non-strangeness. As antagonists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his mother possess an appropriate head-on strength. The poet may need them as figures who do the devil’s work, but the poem needs them more as figures who call up and show off Beowulf’s physical strength and his superb gifts as a warrior. They are the right enemies for a young glory-hunter, instigators of the formal boast, worthy trophies to be carried back from the grim testing-ground – Grendel’s hand is ripped off and nailed up, his head severed and paraded in Heorot. It is all consonant with the surge of youth and the compulsion to win fame ‘as wide as the wind’s home, / as the sea around cliffs’, utterly a manifestation of the Germanic heroic code.
Enter then, fifty years later, the dragon – from his dry-stone vault, from a nest where he is heaped in coils around the body-heated gold. Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests, a Fourth of July effulgence fireworking its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him. He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power, one that can easily survive the prejudice that arises at the very mention of the word ‘dragon’. Whether in medieval art or modern Disney cartoons, the dragon can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but in the final movement of Beowulf he lodges himself in the imagination as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae.
Grendel and his mother enter Beowulf’s life from the outside, accidentally, challenges which in other circumstances he might not have taken up, enemies from whom he might have been distracted or deflected. The dragon, on the other hand, is a given of his home ground, abiding in his under-earth as in his understanding, waiting for the meeting, the watcher at the ford, the questioner who sits so sly, the ‘lion-limb’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins might have called him, against whom Beowulf’s body and soul must measure themselves. Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species – the knowledge, that is, of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.
It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise. Beowulf’s mood as he gets ready to fight the dragon – who could be read as a projection of Beowulf’s own chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience – recalls the mood of other tragic heroes: Oedipus at Colonus, Lear at his ‘ripeness is all’ extremity, Hamlet in the last illuminations of his ‘prophetic soul’:
No easy bargainHere the poet attains a level of insight that approaches the visionary. The subjective and the inevitable are in perfect balance, what is solidly established is bathed in an element that is completely sixth-sensed, and indeed the whole, slow-motion, constantly self-deferring approach to the hero’s death and funeral continues to be like this. Beowulf’s soul may not yet have fled ‘to its destined place among the steadfast ones’, but there is already a beyond-the-grave aspect to him, a revenant quality about his resoluteness. This is not just metrical narrative full of anthropological interest and typical heroic-age motifs; it is poetry of a high order, in which passages of great lyric intensity – such as the ‘Lay of the Last Survivor’ (lines 2247-66) and, even more remarkably, the so-called ‘Father’s Lament’ (2444-62) – rise like emanations from some fissure in the bedrock of the human capacity to endure:
Would be made in that place by any man.
The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
His hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
Unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.
It was like the misery endured by an old manSuch passages mark an ultimate stage in poetic attainment; they are the imaginative equivalent of Beowulf’s spiritual state at the end, when he tells his men that ‘doom of battle will bear [their] lord away’, in the same way that the sea-journeys so vividly described in lines 210-28 and lines 1903-24 are the equivalent of his exultant prime.
Who has lived to see his son’s body
Swing on the gallows. He begins to keen
And weep for his boy, watching the raven
Gloat where he hangs; he can be of no help.
The wisdom of age is worthless to him.
Morning after morning, he wakes to remember
That his child is gone; he has no interest
In living on until another heir
Is born in the hall…
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
And sings a lament; everything seems too large,
The steadings and the fields.
At these moments of lyric intensity, the keel of the poetry is deeply set in the element of sensation while the mind’s lookout sways metrically and far-sightedly in the element of pure comprehension – which is to say that the elevation of Beowulf is always, paradoxically, buoyantly down-to-earth. And nowhere is this more obviously and memorably the case than in the account of the hero’s funeral with which the poems ends. Here the inexorable and the elegiac combine in a description of the funeral pyre being got ready, the body being burnt and the barrow being constructed – a scene at once immemorial and oddly contemporary. The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to the comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy, dignity and unforgiving truth:
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core. They were disconsolate
And wailed aloud for their lord’s decease.
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
With hair bound up, she unburdened herself
Of her worst fears, a wild litany
Of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
Slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
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