The Geats and the Danes — warriors, kings, and the creatures that come in the night.
Beowulf has a focused cast concentrated in three households: the Geatish royal family, the Danish court at Heorot, and the monsters from the mere and the barrow. The poem is not an ensemble drama — it follows one figure from young manhood to old age, and the figures around him exist largely to illuminate what his choices mean.
The poem's hero across both halves of his life. Strong beyond any normal man — the strength of thirty in his grip. Kills Grendel barehanded, Grendel's mother with a cave-forged sword. Returns home, refuses the throne until it falls to him by default, rules fifty winters, dies fighting the dragon in old age. His pyre ends the poem.
Beowulf's young kinsman, the only one of eleven companions who does not flee the dragon. Stays at Beowulf's side, helps land the killing blow, holds him as he dies, fetches the hoard from the barrow at Beowulf's request, and delivers the poem's harshest judgment on the men who ran. The poem leaves the future of the Geats in his hands.
King of the Geats, Beowulf's uncle and lord. He receives Beowulf with joy when he returns from Denmark, hears the full account of the Grendel fights, and rewards him lavishly. His death in a raid on Frisian territory — historical, mentioned in Frankish chronicles — is the event that eventually brings Beowulf to the throne.
The old king whose great hall has been emptied for twelve years by Grendel. He receives Beowulf with the gift-giving generosity the poem celebrates, and gives the long sermon on pride and kingship after the killing of Grendel's mother — the most extended moral reflection in the poem. He calls Beowulf the son he never had.
A thane of Hrothgar's court who challenges Beowulf's credentials at the first feast — bringing up a swimming contest from Beowulf's youth and implying he lost. Beowulf gives him a long, pointed answer. Unferth later lends Beowulf his sword Hrunting for the fight with Grendel's mother. The sword fails. Beowulf returns it politely.
The king's most trusted counsellor and rune-speaker. Grendel's mother seizes him on her retaliatory raid and carries his severed head to the cliff above the mere. Hrothgar's grief over his death is the spur that drives Beowulf to follow her into the lake. His death is the point at which the poem's second movement becomes inevitable.
Descended from Cain, exiled with the giants and all the cursed kindred of the first murder. Lives in the haunted mere outside human settlement. Has emptied Heorot's nights for twelve years. Beowulf tears his arm from its socket in a wrestling match in the dark hall. He flees to the mere to die. The poem gives him a genealogy and, obliquely, a grief.
She comes to Heorot on the night after Grendel dies, to take revenge for her son. Seizes Aeschere and carries him off. Beowulf follows her into the mere, finds her cave, fights her in the dark water. His sword fails; she nearly kills him. He kills her with a giant-forged blade found on the cave wall. The poem treats her grief as real and her killing as necessary.
An old serpent on a buried hoard. A fugitive slave takes a single cup; the dragon discovers the loss and burns the country. Beowulf goes against it with an iron shield, expecting to die. He kills it with Wiglaf's help and dies of its venom in the same fight. The poem treats it less as a personality than as a force: pure possession without exchange, the negation of everything the gift economy held together.