Beowulf the Epic Hero: The Old English Poem
Explore Beowulf, the Geatish hero of the Old English epic — the monster Grendel, the dragon at the end, and the place of the poem in the wider Norse heroic tradition.
Beowulf is the longest and most celebrated poem in Old English. Composed in the eighth or early ninth century, it is the story of a Geatish hero who crosses the sea to the court of the Danish king Hrothgar, slays the monster Grendel and his mother, returns home to become king of the Geats, and dies a half-century later in a fight with a dragon. Its 3,182 lines preserve a world of kings, halls, feasting, gift-giving, feud, and dragon-fight that is the same world as the Völsunga saga, and the figure of Sigurd the Völsung is a close cousin of the figure of Beowulf.
The Manuscript and Its Survival
The Beowulf manuscript (British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv) is a single bound volume of about 130 folios, copied in England in the late tenth or early eleventh century and almost certainly associated with the Benedictine monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury. The manuscript contains four separate works: the prose Life of St Christopher, the poem The Wonders of the East, the letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and Beowulf itself. The manuscript was among the many that suffered in the Cotton library fire of 1731, and the edges of the Beowulf leaves were singed.
The poem was first transcribed by the Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, who made two transcripts in 1786 and 1787 while on a scholarly visit to England. The poem was first printed in Copenhagen in 1814, and the first English translation was that of John Mitchell Kemble in 1833. The standard modern edition is Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf (1999, revised 2011), with the Heorot project of the University of Kentucky providing the digital infrastructure for the modern study of the poem. Had the Cotton library fire of 1731 destroyed the manuscript, the poem would have been lost, and the modern world would have no Beowulf.
The Story of Beowulf
The story of Beowulf is told in two halves. The first half tells of the hero’s youth: his arrival at the Danish court of Hrothgar, his fight with Grendel, his fight with Grendel’s mother, his departure with rich gifts, and his return to the Geats. The second half tells of his kingship: his fifty-year reign, his last fight with the dragon, his death, and his funeral.
In the opening of the poem, the Danish king Hrothgar has built a great hall called Heorot (“the Hart”), and he is feasting his retainers in the great style of the heroic age. The monster Grendel has been haunting Heorot for twelve years, devouring the king’s retainers as they sleep, and the court has been reduced to a state of terror. Beowulf, a young Geatish hero of the royal house of the Wægmundings, hears of Hrothgar’s distress and sails to Denmark with a band of fourteen companions. He is received with elaborate courtesy at the Danish court, and he offers to fight Grendel single-handed.
In the night that follows, Grendel breaks into Heorot and seizes one of Beowulf’s companions, devouring him. Beowulf, who has been feigning sleep, grips the monster with the strength of thirty men, and they fight a long battle in the hall. Beowulf eventually tears off Grendel’s arm, and the monster flees wounded to his lair beneath the waters of the sea. The Danish court celebrates the victory, and Beowulf is laden with gifts.
The second fight is with Grendel’s mother, who comes to Heorot to avenge her son. Beowulf pursues her to her underwater hall, dives into the depths, and slays her with a giant’s sword that he finds there. He returns to Heorot with the hilt of the sword and the head of Grendel. The Danish court again celebrates, and Beowulf returns to Geatland with rich gifts.
The second half of the poem is set fifty years later. Beowulf, now king of the Geats, must face a dragon that has been ravaging his kingdom. Beowulf, now an old man, goes to fight the dragon with a band of eleven retainers. All the retainers flee except one, the young Wiglaf, who stands with the king. Beowulf and Wiglaf fight the dragon, and Beowulf is mortally wounded, but he kills the dragon with the help of Wiglaf. The dying Beowulf asks to see the dragon’s treasure, and he laments that he has no son to inherit his kingship. He gives Wiglaf his golden collar and his war-gear, and he dies. The poem ends with the funeral of Beowulf on a cliff overlooking the sea, with the dragon’s treasure buried in his barrow.
The Hero of Beowulf
The figure of Beowulf as a hero embodies the ideals of the Germanic heroic age. He is a young man of great strength and courage, of noble lineage, of proven loyalty, of skill in combat, and of generosity in the distribution of treasure. He fights for the sake of glory, for the sake of the fame that will be sung by the poets of later generations, and for the sake of the practical good of the peoples he defends. The Beowulf poet calls him “monnа mægencræft on his mund-gripe” — “the might of a man in his hand-grip” — and he is presented as the supreme example of the heroic virtues.
The heroic virtues of Beowulf are not the chivalric virtues of the medieval French and German tradition. There is no courtly love, no religious devotion, no quest for the Holy Grail. The hero is a man of a warrior society, in which the great virtues are courage in battle, generosity in the giving of treasure, loyalty to the lord, and the willingness to die in the service of the people. Wiglaf, the young retainer who stands by Beowulf in the dragon-fight, is the supreme example of this virtue, and the poet’s praise of Wiglaf is among the finest passages in Old English.
The figure of Beowulf has its parallels in the continental and Norse heroic tradition. The hero Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied is a German cousin; the hero Sigurd of the Völsunga saga is a Norse cousin. The hero Achilles of the Greek Iliad is a more distant Indo-European parallel. The hero Cú Chulainn of the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge is a Celtic parallel. The pattern of the dragon-slaying hero who dies in the moment of his triumph is one of the great patterns of the world mythology, and the figure of Beowulf is one of its most fully realised embodiments.
The Monsters of Beowulf
The monsters of Beowulf are three: Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. The figure of Grendel is one of the great monsters of medieval literature, and the Beowulf poet describes him as a descendant of Cain, the first murderer, who has been exiled from the human world and lives in the wild fenland at the edge of the Danish kingdom. Grendel is described in the poem as a “scinlac” (a “shadow-walker”) who cannot be touched by iron, and he is the embodiment of all the dangers that beset the human world from the wilderness that surrounds it. The wider Norse tradition of monsters is treated on the Norse creatures and beings page.
Grendel’s mother is the avenger of Grendel, and her attack on Heorot is a return of the violence of the previous night. The fight with Grendel’s mother takes place in her underwater hall, and the hero must dive into the depths to reach her. The hall is described in terms that suggest an older and more pagan tradition: a hall with a roof, a bed, a fire, a feast-table — all the furnishings of a human hall, but in the depths of the sea.
The dragon at the end of the poem is a different kind of monster. The dragon is not a descendant of Cain, and he is not a threat to the human community from outside it. The dragon is a guardian of a treasure-hoard that has been hidden in a barrow for centuries, and he is roused to anger by a thief who steals a single golden cup. The dragon is, in this sense, a guardian of the older order of the heroic age, and the hero who fights him is fighting against the older order as much as against the dragon. The dragon is also a reminder that the heroic age itself is coming to an end, and the hero’s fight with the dragon is the last fight of the heroic tradition.
The Historical Context of Beowulf
The historical context of Beowulf is the world of the Migration Period and the Vendel period (c. 300–800). The poem makes reference to historical persons and events that can be partly identified: Hygelac, the king of the Geats, who is described in the poem as the uncle and lord of Beowulf, can be identified with the Chochilaicus of the Liber Monstrorum, a king of the Geats who led a Viking raid on the Frisian coast around 516 and was killed in the attack. The Scylding dynasty of the poem is the historical Skjöldung dynasty of the Danish royal house, and the great hall of Heorot has been identified with the great hall of the Lejre complex on the western shore of Zealand, the principal seat of the Danish royal house in the Migration Period. The Beowulf poet’s description of the funeral of Scyld Scefing, the legendary founder of the Scylding dynasty, is closely paralleled by the description of the ship-burial of the historical king of the East Angles at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk (c. 625–635), where a great ship was buried in a barrow with the king’s treasure and the body of the king.
The Geats of the poem are the historical Gautar of southern Sweden, a people whose territory lay in the area of modern Västergötland. The poem’s description of the funeral of Beowulf on a cliff overlooking the sea, with the dragon’s treasure buried in his barrow, is closely paralleled by the description of the great Vendel and Valsgärde boat-burials of central Sweden, and by the description of the great Oseberg and Gokstad ship-burials of southern Norway. The code of the feud that governs the action of the poem is the same code that governs the action of the Völsunga saga and the Hervarar saga, and the historical reality of the code is preserved in the legal codes of the later North: the Gulathing’s Law of c. 950, the Frostathing’s Law of c. 960, and the Grágás of c. 1100.
The Religious Dimension
The religious dimension of Beowulf is one of the most discussed topics in the modern study of the poem. The poem is a Christian poem, written by a Christian poet for a Christian audience, and yet the world it describes is a pagan world. The poet’s solution to the tension between the Christian frame and the pagan content is to maintain both at once: the heroes of the poem are pagans who do not know the Christian God, and the poet comments on their action from a Christian perspective. The monsters of the poem are descendants of Cain, in the poet’s Christian reading, and the heroes of the poem are presented as the instruments of a divine providence that works through them. The hero Beowulf himself is presented as a type of Christ, the saviour of the people who dies in the moment of his triumph.
The pagan elements of the poem are many. The hero prays for victory to the Father of the heavens, but he also appeals to his own strength and his own luck. The great hall of Heorot is described in terms that recall the older Germanic tradition of the hall as a centre of the cult. The funeral of the hero is described in terms that recall the older tradition of the princely burial in the boat or in the barrow. The dragon is described in terms that recall the older tradition of the dragon as a guardian of the treasure. The hero’s fight with the dragon is described in terms that recall the older tradition of the chaos-monster at the end of time. The syncretism of the poem is the syncretism of the Anglo-Saxon Church in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the poem is one of the most fully realised examples of the literary expression of that contact.
The Style and the Verse
The style of Beowulf is one of the great achievements of Old English poetry. The poem is composed in the alliterative long-line, the principal verse-form of Old Germanic poetry, with four principal stresses to the line, a heavy caesura in the middle, and a system of alliteration binding the two halves of the line together. The poem also makes extensive use of the kenning, the periphrastic compound that is one of the great rhetorical devices of Old Germanic poetry. The sea is the “swan-path” (swanrād), the “whale’s bath” (hron-rād), the “sail-road” (sæl-rād). The king is the “ring-giver” (beag-hroden), the “spear of the people” (folces hyrde). The compound nouns of Old English are extraordinarily rich, and the Beowulf poet is a master of the form.
The poem also makes extensive use of the digression, the long interpolated passage that expands on a single detail of the story. The most famous of these is the long passage on the Finnsburg episode (lines 1063–1160), which tells the story of a feud between the Frisians and the Danes that is also the subject of a fragmentary Old English poem preserved in a single leaf. The digressions of Beowulf are not idle; they are integral to the poem’s design, and they connect the action of the poem to the wider heroic tradition of the Germanic world. The style of Beowulf is the style of a poet who is in full command of his material, and the poem is one of the most carefully crafted works of the medieval European tradition.
The Afterlife of the Poem
The afterlife of Beowulf in the Old English tradition is short. The poem is preserved in a single manuscript, and there is no evidence that it was widely copied or widely read in the Anglo-Saxon period. The poem’s central themes — the heroic virtues, the doomed hero, the dragon at the end — are not the central themes of the Anglo-Saxon Christian literature that has survived in the corpus of Old English poetry. The poem is, in this sense, an isolated monument, and its place in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition is more the result of the accidents of manuscript survival than of any continuous reception.
The modern reception of Beowulf is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of literature. The poem was first printed in Copenhagen in 1814, and the first English translation was that of John Mitchell Kemble in 1833. The first great English literary appreciation was that of J. R. R. Tolkien in his lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936), which set the terms for the modern study of the poem. The poem has since been translated into English by William Morris and A. J. Wyatt (1895), by Charles W. Kennedy (1934), by Seamus Heaney (1999), and by Maria Dahvana Headley (2020), and it has been the subject of films, plays, novels, operas, and video games.
The Tolkien lecture of 1936 is the founding document of the modern study of Beowulf. Tolkien’s argument was that the monsters of the poem are central to its design, and that the poem is fundamentally about the confrontation of the human hero with the chaos of the natural world. Tolkien’s reading has been enormously influential, and it has set the terms for the modern appreciation of the poem as a work of art. The figure of Beowulf has also been taken up by the modern fantasy tradition: the figure of Conan the Barbarian of Robert E. Howard draws on the Beowulf archetype, the figure of Aragorn of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has a similar heroic stature, and the figure of Geralt of Rivia of Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher owes something to the Beowulfian hero.
Beowulf and the Heroic Tradition
The relationship between Beowulf and the wider Norse heroic tradition is one of the central topics of modern scholarship. The poem shares a number of central motifs with the Völsunga saga and the Eddic poems: the cursed gold, the doomed hero, the long feud, the fire-walled hall, the dying horse, the dragon at the end, the funeral barrow. The poem is clearly part of the same general pool of tradition as the Völsung cycle, and the figure of Beowulf is closely related to the figure of Sigurd the Völsung in many respects. The two heroes are dragon-slayers, both die in the moment of their triumph, and both are buried in a great barrow with their treasure.
The two traditions also differ in a number of important respects. The Völsunga saga is a long, elaborate, multi-generational narrative in which the hero is only one of many characters. Beowulf is a single, tightly focused poem in which the hero is the centre of attention. The Völsunga saga is a saga of the Germanic heroic age told by a Norse redactor of the thirteenth century. Beowulf is a poem of the Anglo-Saxon heroic age told by an English poet of the eighth century. The two traditions are cousins, but they are not identical, and the comparison of the two is one of the most illuminating exercises in the modern study of Germanic literature.
The English tradition of the heroic age is distinct from the Norse and the continental German traditions, and the Beowulf poem is the centrepiece of that tradition. The other Old English heroic poems — Waldere, The Fight at Finnsburg, Deor, Widsith, The Battle of Maldon — are all parts of the same general tradition, and they preserve glimpses of the heroic age that the Beowulf poem has not preserved. The Battle of Maldon of 991, in which the Anglo-Saxon hero Byrhtnoth fights the Danish Vikings and dies in the heroic tradition, is the last great poem of the Old English heroic tradition, and it is a moving testimony to the continuing power of the heroic ideal in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The Place of Beowulf in the Modern World
The place of Beowulf in the modern world is one of the most secure of any Old English or medieval work. The poem is read in every English-speaking university, and it is a central work of the modern school and university curriculum. The poem has been the subject of more than fifty English translations, more than a thousand critical studies, and a great body of film, television, video-game, and popular-fiction adaptations. The figure of Beowulf is one of the great iconic figures of the modern world, and his story is one of the great stories of the world tradition. The poem’s continuing power is partly a result of the universality of its themes, partly a result of the force of its style, and partly a result of the continuity of the heroic tradition that is also the tradition of the Norse heroes and sagas.