Fitt 1
Scyld's Funeral Ship
The poet begins with a summons: 'Listen!' — the Old English 'Hwæt,' the word that calls a hall to silence. What follows is the founding frame of the poem's world: a king arrives from nowhere, rises to power, and dies. Scyld Scefing comes to the Danes friendless and wretched, becomes their greatest lord, and at his death is laid on a ring-prowed ship with gold, weapons, and jewels piled at the mast — then pushed out to sea, destination unknown. The ship-burial is the poem's first great image: treasure that can't be spent, a leader who cannot be held. The scene establishes what Beowulf will return to repeatedly — that power is given, used for a season, and then reclaimed by the tide. The genealogy that follows traces Hrothgar's lineage and the construction of Heorot, the greatest mead-hall ever built. It too is shadowed: the poet notes, almost as an aside, that Heorot will burn.
Fitt 2
Heorot Rising
This fitt closes the genealogical preamble and opens the poem's conflict. Hrothgar, war-famed and powerful, resolves to build a hall grander than any before it — a place for gift-giving, feasting, and the binding of warriors to their lord. He names it Heorot, the Hart. Workers come from across middle-earth to raise it. The hall is described as towering, gleaming, enormous between its antler-like horns — and the poet notes quietly that it awaits its own destruction in a feud not yet narrated. Inside Heorot, the scop sings of creation — of the Father Almighty shaping earth and sea, setting sun and moon in the sky, filling the land with creatures. It is exactly this song that wakes the monster in the darkness. Grendel is introduced as a 'famous march-stepper,' a creature of the moor-fens who descends from the cursed line of Cain. The hall and the dark are now formally opposed.
Fitt 3
Twelve Winters of Terror
This is the sustained description of Grendel's reign. He comes at night, finds the warriors sleeping, tears thirty men from their beds, and departs laughing. The morning cry of grief, the blood on the benches, the warriors who quietly find other places to sleep — the poet builds the horror through accumulation rather than spectacle. Twelve winters pass. The poem is unflinching about what twelve winters of this means: Heorot still stands but is effectively abandoned after dark. Hrothgar's counselors pray at their shrines, and the poet notes with gentle irony that they remembered hell in their spirit — they did not know God. The Christian frame is present throughout, not as allegory but as the explanatory context the Anglo-Saxon poet brings to his pagan material. Grendel is a creature of divine punishment; the Danes' paganism means they cannot reach the remedy for him.
Fitt 4
The Crossing
The poem's hero enters here, already characterized before he speaks: stoutest and strongest of the living, noble and sturdy, a man whose wise companions urge him on without trying to dissuade him. He orders fourteen companions, a trusty ship, and makes the crossing. The sea-journey is handled in the poem's characteristic quick-cut manner — the ship afloat, the breeze, the foam-necked vessel most like a bird — and then the cliffs of Denmark appear. On the heights above stands the coastguard, Hrothgar's sentinel, who rides down to challenge the strangers with a lance. His challenge is both practical and thematic: he notes that he has never seen a greater earl on earth than one of their company, and asks plainly who they are and where they come from. It is the poem's first formal confrontation, and Beowulf is not yet named in it.
Fitt 5
The Boar-Crested Helmets
This fitt is about the social machinery of heroic arrival: who you are, what your lineage is, what you have come to do, and whether your purpose is honorable enough to be admitted. Beowulf opens his word-hoard — the poem's kenning for the act of speech — and gives a measured, accurate account of his lineage, his errand, and the kind of help he intends to offer. The coastguard, satisfied, leads them himself to Heorot and leaves a guard on their ship. The march to the hall is one of the poem's great visual passages: the ring-mail glistening, the ringing sword bright, the boar-figures on their helmets vivid with gilding and flame-hardened. The boar is the Old English warrior's standard protective emblem, and its description here as 'keeping watch' — guarding the bearers — is the poem's characteristic animation of objects.
Fitt 6
At the Threshold
Arrival in an Old English hall is a graduated process of identification. The Geats have passed the coastguard; now, inside the precinct, a proud-minded retainer challenges them again. The challenge is nearly identical in form — lineage, purpose, origin — and Beowulf's reply is briefer now that the ground has been covered: 'I am called Beowulf.' He asks to be brought before Hrothgar. The retainer, Wulfgar, prince of the Wendels, is named and characterized in a line: his boldness of spirit, prowess and prudence were known to many. He takes the message to Hrothgar, who is sitting old and hoary with his earls around him. This fitt is about thresholds: each one crossed requires an account of oneself, and the account must be earned by the self's actual content.
Fitt 7
The King Remembers
This fitt is the poem's central introduction scene, and it carries enormous weight. Hrothgar recognizes Beowulf before meeting him — he remembers Ecgtheow, the hero's father, and knows the family's history. He says that God the Creator has sent this man to the West-Danes against Grendel's grimness. When Beowulf enters, his speech is one of the poem's great formal set-pieces: he offers his lineage, his combat record, and his specific request — to fight Grendel with no weapons, only his hand-grip, matching the monster's own terms. The reason is tactical and thematic at once: Grendel uses no weapons, so Beowulf will use none, and he frames the fight as a matter to be decided by the judgment of the Lord. He also warns Hrothgar, with the directness the poem consistently admires, that he may be eaten — and that if so, Hrothgar need not trouble about his funeral.
Fitt 8
The Weight of Twelve Years
Hrothgar's speech in this fitt is one of the most revealing passages in the first movement: an old king's honest account of what it costs to be helpless. He accepts Beowulf's offer and then explains the history — Ecgtheow's feud with the Wilfings, the exile, the oath sworn to Hrothgar across the sea, the debt the king paid on his behalf. The backstory establishes that Beowulf owes Hrothgar a family debt, which gives the visit a moral weight beyond heroic volunteering. Then comes the grief: Hrothgar describes what twelve years of Grendel has done to his hall-troop. Warriors brave over ale have promised to wait for the monster — and in the morning the hall is bloody, the bench-planks flooded, the men gone. The banquet that follows is deliberately juxtaposed against this account: the warriors sit down, an ornamented goblet is passed, the minstrel sings. Joy and dread occupy the same hall.
Fitt 9
Unferth's Challenge
Unferth is one of the poem's most carefully constructed minor figures. He sits at the feet of Hrothgar and is introduced as a man who could not grant that any other under heaven should gain more glory than himself. His taunting of Beowulf is socially understood: in the hall, a new man with extravagant credentials will attract a challenge from the resident champion. The story Unferth tells is specific — the swimming match with Breca on the open sea, the seven nights of struggle, Beowulf's defeat when the currents washed Breca ashore first. The details are precise and the tone is contemptuous: you were beaten at swimming by Breca; what makes you think you can face Grendel? Beowulf's reply will begin in the next fitt. The challenge itself shows how the poem tests its heroes: first the coastguard, then Wulfgar's retainer, now Unferth — every threshold requires an accounting.
Fitt 10
The Breca Swim, Told True
Beowulf's answer to Unferth is the first extended display of the hero's voice, and it is a masterclass in the Old English art of the flyting — a formal verbal duel where claims about the past are weapons. He accepts Unferth's challenge as freely and wildly spoken, fuddled with beer, and then gives the corrected account: the swimming match was a mutual teenage boast, and what actually happened in the water was not a competition but five nights of combat against sea-monsters who dragged him to the sea-floor and were killed with his sword. He fetched up alive on the Finnish coast after killing nine of them. This is greater than anything Breca did, greater than anything Unferth has done — and Unferth, the poem notes, killed his own brothers, a deeper disgrace than any swimming loss. The counter-attack is complete: Beowulf's past is more impressive, and Unferth's disqualifying crime is named. The hall's glee rises; the queen enters; Beowulf drinks his cup.
Fitt 11
The Watcher in the Dark
This fitt is the hinge of the poem's first movement: the transition from the hall's joy to the monster's approach. Hrothgar departs, leaving Beowulf formally entrusted with the watch. Beowulf removes his iron armor, hands off his sword, and makes a speech of quiet defiance: he holds himself no meaner in matters of prowess than Grendel himself, and so he will not use a sword-edge on him. The fight will be hand to hand, weaponless, because Grendel has no skill with weapons and Beowulf will match him equally. The wise-minded Father will assign the glory to whichever side he sees fit. Then Beowulf bends to his pillow and the other warriors sleep — many of them for the last time, the poem says, adding its characteristic note of prior knowledge. Through the dark the twilight traveler comes tramping and striding. All sleep save one.
Fitt 12
The Hand-Grip
This is the poem's first great set-piece of violence, rendered in a characteristically Old English mix of distance and physical immediacy. Grendel moves beneath the sky to the wine-joyful building, flings open the iron-banded door with a touch of his fingers, and surveys the hall with eyes shining like flame. He seizes a sleeping warrior, bites through his bone-cage, drinks the blood in streams, swallows him in great mouthfuls. Then he steps toward the next man — and something reaches up and grips his hand. The moment Beowulf's grip closes on Grendel's arm is the moment the monster's whole confidence collapses: nowhere in middle-earth had he ever felt a hand-grip stronger than this. Fear seizes him. He cannot break free. He is thinking of death. The physical shock of it is rendered in a single sustained sentence whose grammar enacts the trap closing.
Fitt 13
The Shoulder Torn
The outcome of the fight is rendered in the poem's most physically specific passage of violence. Beowulf's companions rush to help with their battle-swords, slashing at Grendel from all sides — and the blades do nothing. Grendel has sworn himself safe from victory-swords; the enchantment holds. But Beowulf's grip holds too, and the contest between hand and hand is decided when the sinews of Grendel's shoulder split apart and the body bursts open. Grendel flees, trailing death-wound, to hide in the fen-cliffs and marshes. He will die there. The visible proof of the victory is left hanging under the great hall-roof: Grendel's arm — hand, arm, and shoulder, all the claw together — hung up by Beowulf as the dawn trophy of the night's work.
Fitt 14
The Morning After
The morning after the fight is the poem in its celebratory mode, and the celebration is characteristically complicated. Warriors come from across the country to examine Grendel's trail and the pool where he died — the water bubbling with blood, the angry eddies seething with gore. They see the monster is gone and feel little grief. Young men ride horseback, racing along the country roads, and the scop begins composing new verses on the spot: Beowulf's feat is immediately absorbed into the tradition of heroic song, placed beside the legends of Sigmund the dragon-slayer and the cautionary tale of Heremod, the failed king. The poem within the poem is the highest honor the tradition can confer — to be turned into song while still alive.
Fitt 15
Hrothgar's Joy and Warning
This fitt is Hrothgar at his most fully realized: a king grateful beyond words, generous to the point of calling Beowulf his own son, and wise enough in age to look at the trophy in the rafters and know what it means and what it does not mean. His speech of gratitude is also a speech about God's power to work wonder upon wonder — the theological frame reasserts itself at the moment of triumph. Beowulf's own reply is telling: he is sorry Hrothgar could not see Grendel in person, he wanted to hold the monster more firmly, he wanted to lay him dead on the death-bed. Beowulf is already moving toward the next problem. The fitt ends with the preparation for the great feast of reward.
Fitt 16
The Gift of Horses and Swords
This fitt enacts the gift-economy at its most ceremonially elaborate. Hrothgar presents Beowulf with gifts that constitute an entire warrior's complement: standard, embroidered banner, mail-coat, helmet, and a sword carried before the hero with ceremony. Then eight horses with gold-plated bridles, and on one of them the king's own battle-saddle set with jewels. The poem notes with the specificity it reserves for things that matter that no one who tells the truth in full fairness will condemn Hrothgar for the generosity. The presentation is not mere reward — it is the formal sealing of the bond between them, the material form of the kinship Hrothgar declared in the previous fitt. Gifts are not optional in this world; they are the mechanism by which loyalty is built and remembered.
Fitt 17
The Finn Episode
This is the poem's most sustained digression, and it is not accidental. The Finn episode is sung in Heorot at the height of the hall's celebration, immediately after Hrothgar's great gift-giving — and it tells the story of a hall that was the site of a massacre, a winter endured in enforced company with an enemy, and an eventual revenge that destroyed the peace that had been carefully constructed. The half-Danish hero Hnæf is killed; his sister Hildeburg loses both son and brother on the same pyre; Finn, her husband, accepts a settlement that survives one winter before Hengest takes his revenge. The digression is a shadow-story: the audience of Heorot knows, as they listen, that Heorot too will burn in a feud between kinsmen. The scop is not singing about the past. He is singing about the future.
Fitt 18
Hengest's Revenge and Wealhtheow's Gifts
The Finn lay concludes and the feast resumes — the transition is one of the poem's most deliberate juxtapositions. Hengest survives the blood-tainted winter at Finn's court, unable to sail home, enduring in the company of his lord's killer. When spring comes and the seas open, his thoughts run more to revenge than to the sea-voyage; when Hun of the Frisians places the battle-sword Láfing in his hand, the decision is made. Guthlaf and Oslaf's mournful accusation breaks Finn's spirit; the hall is covered in corpses, Finn is slain, and Hildeburg is carried back to Denmark captive. The lay ends. Cheers rise. The cup-bearers pour wine. Wealhtheow comes forward under her golden crown to present Beowulf the greatest neck-ring he has ever heard of — and to ask him to be gentle with her sons.
Fitt 19
The Feast's End
This short fitt closes the feast and opens the hall to the night again. Wealhtheow completes her gift-giving with twisted gold — arm-jewels and rings and a mail-shirt, the greatest of neck-rings she has heard of. She charges Beowulf directly: enjoy this collar in safety, show yourself strong, be gentle with counsel. She commends him to her son and to the peace of the hall. Then the warriors clear the ale-benches, cover the floor with beds and pillows, and sleep. The poet names what they do not know: there is a fate already set for many of them, a cruel destiny that will befall more than one noble. Doomed to his death, one of the beer-thanes bows down to sleep. The night is coming again.
Fitt 20
She Comes for Her Son
The poem's second movement opens without ceremony: one man pays with his life for his evening rest, as they often paid before. Grendel's mother is introduced as a second threat that the killing of the first monster has activated: a monstrous woman who has kept her sorrow in mind, descended from the same line of Cain, living in the horrible waters. The poet compares her to her son explicitly — the terror is less severe, only by as much as the war-strength of a woman is less than a warrior's. She is still more than enough. She seizes Aeschere, Hrothgar's dearest counselor and shoulder-companion, and carries him off. She takes Grendel's claw back with her. The uproar in Heorot wakes Beowulf in his separate chamber; the old ruler is stricken in spirit; and the poem has announced a second problem that the first solution did not solve.',
Fitt 21
The Mere Described
This fitt is the poem's finest piece of landscape writing. Hrothgar describes the place where Grendel's mother has gone with Aeschere: a pair of great march-striding creatures haunting the moorlands, one in the shape of a man, one a woman; earth-dwelling people in the old days called the male one Grendel; no one knows his father. They guard wolf-coverts and wind-beaten headlands, the most dreadful fen-deeps, where a flood from the mountains rattles downward beneath mists on the cliffs. The mere where they live is not far in miles but worlds away in spirit: forests hanging frost-white over the water, an uncanny darkness, fire on the surface at night, and the heath-stepper — the stag pursued by hounds even unto death — who will die sooner on the bank than venture in to hide his head. The description is the poem's most concentrated rendering of the dark that surrounds the hall.
Fitt 22
Into the Mere
The descent to the mere is the poem's most carefully prepared sequence of action. Beowulf's vow to Hrothgar is absolute: wherever she tries to go — earth, mountain, or sea-bottom — she will not escape. He arms with inlaid mail-coat, bright-shining helmet, and Hrunting, the great sword lent by Unferth — old and most excellent among all treasures, its blade of iron stained with poison, hardened with battle-gore, never having failed any hero who held it. The trail leads over stony cliffs and through close-covered paths to the joyless forest and the mere below, where the water stands welling up and gory. The warriors find Aeschere's head on the cliff. Serpents and sea-dragons try the waters. Beowulf sends an arrow into one of them. Then he puts on his battle-gear and dives. This fitt ends at the threshold of the cave — the most claustrophobic passage in the poem is still to come.
Fitt 23
Into the Mere
Fitt XXIII is the descent sequence — the most atmospherically dense passage in the poem. Beowulf bequeaths Hrunting to Unferth and leaps into the mere without waiting for a reply. He sinks for a full day before touching bottom. Grendel's mother seizes him, drags him into an air-filled cave beneath the water where fire-light burns despite the flood above. His mail-coat holds against her claws; the sword Hrunting, famed blade that had never failed, will not bite her hide. The chapter ends on that failure — the hero's best weapon useless, the fight at its most desperate. The cave-under-lake is the poem's most claustrophobic image: older than the hall, colder, lit by a wrong kind of fire.
Fitt 24
The Giant Sword
Fitt XXIV is the pivot and the resolution of the underwater fight. Hrunting has failed. Beowulf sees the ancient giant-sword on the cave wall — a weapon no human hand was supposed to hold — and uses it. One blow breaks through her bone-joints; she falls. He finds Grendel's corpse nearby and takes his head as a trophy. Then the sword's blade, touched by the venomous blood, melts down to the hilt like ice in spring: the weapon destroys itself in the act of winning. Above, Hrothgar's men have given Beowulf up for dead and gone home. Only the Geats remain at the lake-edge, waiting. Four of them carry Grendel's severed head back to Heorot on a spear.
Fitt 25
The Hilt and the Sermon Begins
Fitt XXV is the return to the hall and the first of Hrothgar's great speeches. Beowulf presents the trophies — Grendel's head and the melted hilt — and announces that Heorot is now permanently safe. Hrothgar receives the hilt and reads the runic inscription: the story of the Flood that destroyed the giants, and the name of the sword's first owner, engraved in gleaming gold. The king then begins a long moral address to Beowulf, using the negative example of Heremod — a king who had every gift but squandered it in cruelty — as the opening of his warning against pride. The sermon is the poem's longest sustained piece of reflection and continues into the next fitt.
Fitt 26
Hrothgar's Warning
Fitt XXVI completes Hrothgar's great address. He describes the anatomy of pride with the precision of a physician — it enters a sleeping man like an arrow under his helmet, the guard-spirit asleep — and catalogues what strips the proud king in the end: illness, the sword, old age, fire, or the flood of water. The speech is the poem's most extended moral teaching, and it is addressed specifically to a young man at his moment of greatest triumph. The timing is the whole point. After the sermon, the hall settles into feast and sleep. Beowulf returns Hrunting to Unferth with thanks; he speaks no blame of the blade even though it failed him underwater, because courtesy is part of what the poem measures in its heroes.
Fitt 27
Farewell to Hrothgar
Fitt XXVII is one of the poem's most affecting passages — a departure that both men know is final. Beowulf announces the Geats are ready to sail. He offers Hrothgar Hygelac's alliance and military aid whenever it is needed. Hrothgar answers with a speech that is formally a commendation but is emotionally a farewell: he calls Beowulf the best-spoken young warrior he has known, predicts that if Hygelac dies before him Beowulf will make the finest king the Sea-Geats could choose, and then embraces him, weeps on his neck, and lets him go. The poet notes that Hrothgar did not expect to see the young hero again. The Geats walk down to the ship under the watching sun. The harbor-warden of Heorot is praised by the poet in passing: blameless in every way until age took his strength, as age often injures many.
Fitt 28
Home Waters
Fitt XXVIII is a transitional chapter but not an empty one. The homeward voyage is brisk: the harbor-guard who challenged them on arrival is now greeted as a friend, Beowulf gives him a gold-bound sword as a parting gift, and the ship runs along the sea until the Geatish cliffs appear on the horizon. The harbor-warden at home is ready for them at the shore. But the chapter's most unusual passage is a digression on two queens: Hygd, Hygelac's young wife, praised for wisdom and generosity despite her few winters in the stronghold, and then Thrytho, an earlier queen who had warriors killed for daring to look at her until marriage to Offa civilized her out of her rage. The digression on Thrytho is one of the poem's unexplained gestures — she appears, is judged, and is set aside.
Fitt 29
Report to Hygelac
Fitt XXIX is the homecoming scene at Hygelac's court. Hygd passes among the benches with the mead-cups; the hall is warm and the welcome is genuine. Hygelac's first words reveal that he had been anxious — he had openly prayed that Beowulf would not seek out the murderous spirit, would leave the South-Danes to settle their own matter with Grendel. He thanks God that the warrior returned safely. Then the formal questioning begins: what happened at Heorot? The chapter is also notable for Beowulf's retelling of Hrothgar's marriage arrangement — the Dane-king gave his daughter Freawaru to Ingeld of the Heathobards to cement a peace, but Beowulf predicts the peace will not hold: old grudges between peoples do not dissolve because a woman crosses between them.
Fitt 30
The Grendel Story Retold
Fitt XXX is the poem's structural mirror: Beowulf retells to Hygelac what the reader witnessed in the first movement, and the retelling is not identical to what we saw. New details appear. Hondscio, his companion eaten by Grendel, is named and mourned. The monster's battle-glove — a hideous bag sewn from human skins — is described for the first time; Grendel intended Beowulf to join the others inside it. The emotional texture of the report is different from the action: Beowulf is translating combat into words for a king who was not there. He also reports Æthelric's feast and Hrothgar's grief for Æschere, carried off by Grendel's mother, and the morning scene at the mere that the poem told from a distance is now seen through Beowulf's eyes.
Fitt 31
Gifts Exchanged
Fitt XXXI is the gift-giving chapter, and it is the poem's fullest demonstration of how the hall economy works when it works well. Beowulf presents everything Hrothgar gave him to Hygelac — he brings it all, keeps nothing for himself — including the great neck-ring Wealhtheow gave him, which he passes to Hygd, Hygelac's queen. The story of the neck-ring connects it to the famous Brosinga necklace of legend, giving a moment's mythological depth to an object that was already extraordinary. Hygelac's response is what the system demands of a good lord: he gives more than he received. He brings out the heirloom sword of Hrethel, the most valuable weapon in the Geat treasury, and gives Beowulf seven thousand hides of land and a hall with lordship. The chapter also foreshadows Beowulf's accession: Hygelac will die, Heardred will be killed, and Beowulf will take the throne.
Fitt 32
The Dragon Wakes
Fitt XXXII opens the poem's third and final movement with a shift of register and a fifty-year jump. A fugitive slave, seeking shelter and a bribe for his lord, stumbles into a barrow and takes a single cup. The chapter pauses to describe the hoard's origin: the lay of the last survivor, one of the most desolate passages in all of Old English poetry, in which the last man of a vanished people buries their gold and laments that there is no one left to give it to. The dragon has lain on this hoard for three hundred winters. It discovers the theft not immediately but eventually — sniffing along the stone until it finds the intruder's track — and then it goes out burning halls and villages in the night. By morning Beowulf's own hall is ash.
Fitt 33
The Old King Prepares
Fitt XXXIII is Beowulf as old king, and it is the poem's most explicit meditation on aged courage. When told his hall is burning, his first response is grief so sharp the poet pauses to record it — and then self-examination: had he somehow angered God? The answer he reaches is no, and then the preparations begin. He orders an iron shield, knowing wood will not hold against the dragon's fire. He considers going against it with a war-band and decides against it: this is his fight. The chapter then moves into reminiscences — Beowulf remembers the battle at Friesland where Hygelac was killed and he survived by fighting his way to the sea and swimming home in full armor. The memory of his strength in that moment is both a comfort and a marker of how much time has passed.
Fitt 34
Eleven Companions
Fitt XXXIV is the march to the barrow and the final round of reminiscences. Eleven companions, the reluctant slave as thirteenth man pointing the way, and Beowulf walking with fury to look upon the fire-drake. The chapter deepens the emotional register with the memory of Hrethel: Beowulf's grandfather-king who took the young Geat boy into his hall and treated him as a son. Hrethel died of grief — not in battle, not from an enemy, but because his own son Hæthcyn accidentally killed his brother Herebald with an arrow, and the law gave Hrethel no recourse against his own child for his own child's death. The old king could not act, could not avenge, could not heal the wound. He chose death instead of life under those conditions. It is one of the poem's darkest human stories.
Fitt 35
The Last Speech
Fitt XXXV completes the reminiscences and delivers Beowulf's last great formal speech. The Swedish-Geat wars are recalled: Hæthcyn killed by Ongentheow, the terrible Swedish counter-assault at Ravenswood. These are the enemies who will swarm over Geat lands after Beowulf's death — a fact the poem lets the audience carry. Then the speech: Beowulf tells the eleven companions that no man may go against the dragon in his place. Not because he forbids it but because no one else can. He would rather fight it barehanded, as he fought Grendel, if he knew any way to do it without the blade — but he will use a sword and his iron shield. He advances alone to the barrow-entrance, the brook foaming with dragon-heat, and shouts his war-cry into the stone. The dragon answers with fire.
Fitt 36
Wiglaf Alone Remains
Fitt XXXVI introduces Wiglaf and records the moment the poem has been building toward for three movements: what a man does when his lord needs him and the cost of doing it is visible and immediate. Wiglaf's lineage is given — Weohstan's son, of the Wægmunding line, kinsman of Beowulf — and then his decision is described without ceremony. He sees his liegelord burning under the dragon's fire, he remembers the gifts given in the hall, and he goes. He speaks to the ten who are fleeing: the words about the mead-hall obligations are the poem's sharpest statement of the theme. The ten do not return. Beowulf's iron shield melts. His sword fails on the dragon's hide. He is in the same position as the cave under the mere — his weapons failing, his body taking damage — but he is fifty years older, and there is no giant sword waiting on the wall.
Fitt 37
The Killing Blow
Fitt XXXVII is the killing of the dragon and the beginning of Beowulf's death. The action is swift and precise: Wiglaf, in the moment Beowulf strikes and the dragon rears, drives his sword upward from below into the creature's body. The blow lands softer and lower than the belly. Beowulf, still conscious, draws the short war-knife he carries on his armor and cuts the dragon through the middle. Both foes are felled — pair of related land-chiefs working together, the poet says. Then the wound from the dragon's venom begins to work. Beowulf walks to a seat along the wall, the strength going out of him. He removes his helmet. He sees the stone arches of the eternal earth-hall standing above him and speaks his last formal words: fifty winters of rule, no neighboring king dared face him with weapons, he held to his own, broke no oaths, killed no beloved companions in carousing.
Fitt 38
The Hoard and the Death
Fitt XXXVIII is one of the quietest and heaviest chapters in the poem. Wiglaf goes into the barrow alone — the dragon is dead, but the cave is still described with the full atmosphere of the dragon's presence, the ancient cups and flagons and the rotting standard of the last survivor. He loads his arms with what he can carry and brings it back to Beowulf. The dying king looks at the hoard he won and thanks God that he could gain such treasures for his people before his death-day. He asks for a burial mound to be built on the headland at Hronesness, visible to sailors. Then he gives Wiglaf everything he still wears — the golden collar, the war-mail, the gold-flashing helmet — and dies. The last act of the poem's gift economy is a dying king stripping himself to give to the one man who stayed.
Fitt 39
Wiglaf's Indictment
Fitt XXXIX is the aftermath and the indictment. Beowulf and the dragon both lie dead — the dragon stretched nearby, forty-five feet long, the poem reports, a creature of night undone in its own darkness. The ten companions who fled into the woods while Wiglaf fought alone now come back to the scene carrying their shields. They find Wiglaf sitting exhausted at the shoulder of his dead king. His speech to them is the most cutting in the poem: they received gold and weapons from Beowulf's hand at the ale-bench, pledged to repay with service in his need, and in the moment of need they ran. He names what the armor they are wearing meant, what the oath taken over the mead-cups was for. He does not shout. He looks at the hated ones and speaks the truth, which is worse than shouting.
Fitt 40
The News Goes Out
Fitt XL opens with the messenger dispatched to the Geat war-troop that has been sitting above the cliffs all morning waiting for news. His announcement of Beowulf's death is in the poem's characteristic mode: he states the fact and immediately sets it in the geopolitical context that makes it catastrophic. The king of the Geats is dead. And therefore the Franks and Frisians will no longer hold back — old grudges from Hygelac's fatal Frisian raid will surface. And the Swedes, the hereditary enemies, the people who drove the Geats to Ravenswood under Ongentheow, will not stay quiet either. The messenger knows exactly what the death of one king means for a small people surrounded by enemies who have been kept out only by that king's name and reputation.
Fitt 41
The Swedish Wars
Fitt XLI is the messenger's extended retrospect on the Swedish-Geat wars, given in enough detail to function as a second poem within the poem. The death of Hæthcyn at Swedish hands, the Geat pursuit to Ravenswood, the terrible night in the wood under Ongentheow's siege. Then the rescue by Hygelac and the decisive counter-battle: Wulf, Wonred's son, attacking Ongentheow and being beaten back until his brother Eofor stepped in with a giant-sword and killed the old Swedish king. Hygelac rewarded both brothers handsomely — a hundred thousand in land and rings. The generosity is emphasized because it is the model of right lordship, and because it is the past that makes the present loss legible. Beowulf was the last link in that chain of gift and loyalty.
Fitt 42
The Hoard Buried Again
Fitt XLII is the final disposition of the hoard and the beginning of the funeral preparations. Wiglaf speaks a brief, sad address to the assembled Geats — we could not dissuade our beloved liegelord from the fight, he says, and now we must carry out what he asked. He leads seven chosen men into the barrow. A torchbearer goes first. They strip the remaining treasure: cups, platters, helmets, the ancient standard. They push the dragon's body over the cliff-edge into the sea — the wave-currents take the ward of the treasures. Then the hoard is loaded onto a wain. The noblest of men — Beowulf — is carried to Hronesness. The final line of the chapter is unadorned: there wounden gold was loaded onto a wain, a mass unmeasured, the men-leader borne off to Whale's-Ness.
Fitt 43
The Funeral Pyre
Fitt XLIII is the end of the poem. The funeral pyre on the headland, the smoke ascending into the sky mingled with weeping. The mound built in ten days, visible far out at sea, the brave one's beacon. The twelve horsemen who ride around the mound chanting the praise-song, calling Beowulf the kindest of kings under heaven, the gentlest of men, the most winning of manner, the friendliest to folk-troops, and the fondest of honor. And the gold: all of it buried back in the earth with him. Every ornament the earls had carried from the dragon's cave — the earnings of all those warriors — entrusted again to the dust, where it yet remains as useless as it ever was. The poem ends on that line. The treasure was buried, is buried still, useless. The argument of the poem is complete.