Beowulf — themes & analysis

Beowulf is structured around an argument that Tolkien named more precisely than any other reader of the poem: that the heroic life is not redemptive in any final sense but is dignified anyway. The poem is unflinching about the futility of its own action. Heorot, whose construction is described in the opening as one of the wonders of the age, is shadowed from the moment of its building by the poet's brief aside that it will burn — in a feud the poem only sketches, between Hrothgar's Danes and the Heathobards.

Beowulf's killing of Grendel saves the hall for a season but does not save it from history. His killing of Grendel's mother does not heal the larger feuds. His fifty winters as king of the Geats, peaceful and prosperous, end in a dragon-fight he cannot win without dying, after which his country is overrun by enemies kept in check only by his presence. The hoard he died winning is reburied with him because no one alive can use it.

Every piece of action in the poem, taken individually, is a victory. Every piece taken in context is a deferral of the loss it will eventually meet. The poem does not pretend this is anything other than what it is. The poet steps back, again and again, to remind the audience that the king will die, that the hall will burn, that the gold will lie buried again, that the songs sung in the halls of the great will be sung in different halls by different singers when these singers are gone.

What the poem refuses to do is conclude that the action was therefore not worth doing. Beowulf goes against the dragon as an old man and dies. Wiglaf stays at his side. The funeral pyre at the end of the poem is enormous and the lament is long. The argument of the poem is that the funeral is not a defeat of the courage; it is the form the courage takes when the world is what the world is. Tolkien, who called this ‘the theory of courage,’ read it as the deepest thing the Northern imagination had given to European literature.

Where to follow it: Fitt I (Scyld's funeral ship), Fitt XIV (Heorot's shadow foretold), Fitt XXXII (the last survivor's lament), Fitt XLIII (the burning of Beowulf).

The image at the centre of the poem is the great hall — Heorot in the first movement, Beowulf's own hall in the third — set against the night and the wilderness outside it. Old English society as the poem imagines it is built on the hall: the lord at the high seat, the warriors on benches at the long tables, the gift-giving by which loyalty is paid for, the songs that link the present to the lost past, the fire burning. Outside the hall is everything the hall keeps out: the cold, the wolves, the mere where Grendel's kin live, the dragons sleeping in their barrows, the feuds that have not yet broken, the night.

The poem's monsters all come from outside the hall, and they all attack it directly. Grendel hates the sound of song coming from Heorot and pulls down the warriors who sleep there. The dragon, when its hoard is disturbed, burns Beowulf's hall to the foundations. The mere where Grendel's mother lives is described with concentrated dread — the bottomless water, the trees leaning over with their roots burning, the deer that will not enter the woods even pursued by hounds — so that Beowulf's descent into it is the most claustrophobic passage in the poem.

What the hall represents is not only safety but meaning: the place where the past can be sung, where gifts can be given that bind one warrior to another, where a young man like Beowulf can be welcomed by a king and given a place at the bench. The dark is what dissolves all of this. The poem's structural genius is to show, again and again, that the hall is built directly on the dark, that the dark is older than the hall, that the dark waits.

The Old English elegies — The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin — share the same vision in shorter compass. Beowulf is the long version. The hall is the poem's answer to the dark, and the answer is never permanent. The only response available to the people inside is to live well there for as long as the fire burns.

Where to follow it: Fitt II (Heorot rising), Fitt III (twelve winters of terror), Fitt XXI (description of the mere), Fitt XXXII (the dragon burns Beowulf's hall).

The poet's choice to identify Grendel as a descendant of Cain — explicit at lines 102–114 and again at 1260–1267 — is one of the most consequential single moves in the poem. Grendel could have been a generic Northern monster, of which the Old English imagination had plenty. Instead the poet places him in the genealogy of the Hebrew Bible, descended from the first murderer, exiled from the human community by an act of fratricide whose punishment was to wander the dark places of the earth.

The decision changes the whole register of the conflict. Grendel is not just an animal threatening a settlement; he is a creature whose existence is the consequence of the world's first wrong choice, and his hatred for the song coming from Heorot is the hatred of the cursed for the unfallen. The poet, working in a Christian tradition that had absorbed the older heroic material rather than replacing it, reads the heroic-age violence of his own legendary past through the lens of the Genesis story he believes is the true history of all violence.

The result is not allegory. Grendel remains a creature, with arms and breath and blood, and Beowulf kills him in a wrestling match that is one of the most physical sequences in early English poetry. The Christian frame deepens the action rather than displacing it. Grendel's mother, when she comes the next night, is the same kind of being — kin of Cain, a creature whose grief for her son is recognizable as grief and whose fight Beowulf nearly loses.

The poem refuses to make either of them merely evil. They are exiled. They are lonely. They are cursed. They are also dangerous, and Beowulf kills them, and the killing is necessary, and the necessity is part of what the poem is grieving. The hardest reading the poem demands is the one that holds both at once.

Where to follow it: Fitt III (Grendel introduced, the Cain genealogy), Fitt XII (the wrestling match), Fitt XX (Grendel's mother arrives), Fitt XXIII (fight in the cave).

The poem's economic vocabulary is one of its central themes. Old English heroic society is held together by an exchange — the lord gives gifts; the retainers give loyalty; the bond between them is renewed by the giving. The most loaded compound noun in the poem is beag-gyfa, ring-giver, the king who hands out arm-rings and torcs from the high seat. The most loaded scene is the giving of treasure — when Hrothgar showers Beowulf with horses, weapons, and gold cups — and the most loaded image is the hoard.

The poem's three monsters are all, in different ways, perversions of the gift economy. Grendel is the outcast who has no lord, no hall, no place at the bench, and whose attacks on Heorot are the act of one excluded from the system trying to destroy it. Grendel's mother, defending her son's right to vengeance, is acting under the laws of feud rather than gift. The dragon is the absolute negation: a creature who has gathered an entire treasury and lies on it, taking pleasure in possession without exchange, until a single stolen cup brings down its rage.

The poet sets against the dragon image the lay of the last survivor — a long passage in which a man, the only one left of his people, brings the buried gold of his kin into the barrow that the dragon will later occupy, and laments that there is no one left to give the gold to. The lament is the poem's argument in miniature. Gold is not a substance; it is a relation. When the relations break, the gold becomes the dragon's.

When Beowulf dies and the hoard he won is buried with him, useless, the poem is showing the same logic from the other side. The one act of pure gift in the final movement is Wiglaf's — the young warrior who stays by Beowulf's side in the dragon-fight when ten others run, and who has nothing to gain from the staying. The poem ends with that act registered.

Where to follow it: Fitt XV (Hrothgar's gifts after the killing), Fitt XXXII (the hoard and the dragon; lay of the last survivor), Fitt XXXVI (Wiglaf stays when others flee), Fitt XXXVIII (the hoard brought out for the dying king).

The Cotton Vitellius A.xv codex, in which Beowulf alone survives, was part of the library gathered by the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries from the dispersal of monastic libraries after Henry VIII's dissolution. By the early eighteenth century the collection had passed to his grandson and was lodged in Ashburnham House at Westminster. On 23 October 1731, Ashburnham House caught fire. Roughly a quarter of the Cotton library was destroyed and most of the rest damaged. Beowulf survived — but the manuscript was severely scorched, the edges of the leaves crumbling for decades afterward, and the poem nearly lost.

The first transcription of any substance was made between 1786 and 1787 by the Icelandic-born scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, from a manuscript whose readable surface was already shrinking. Thorkelin's two transcripts — one made by him, one by a professional copyist — preserve readings the original no longer yields, because the binding methods of early nineteenth-century restorers covered some text that has not been recovered since. The first printed edition was Thorkelin's, in 1815, with a parallel Latin translation that was wrong in many places.

For nearly a century after its publication, the poem was regarded primarily as a historical document — a window onto the lost world of Northern paganism, useful for what it told scholars about the Migration Period rather than for what it was as a poem. Tolkien's 1936 lecture to the British Academy changed that. After Tolkien, the poem's deep theme is no longer in dispute: it is the dignity of acting well in a world where action does not save what it acts for.

Almost all of the rest of the Old English alliterative oral tradition is gone. What survives — the elegies, the riddles, The Battle of Maldon, some saints’ lives — is a fraction of what must have been composed. Beowulf is the long poem of a tradition we have only in pieces, copied by scribes who may not have fully understood it, preserved by an accident of fire and water that could have gone the other way. The narrowness of the survival is part of what gives the poem its weight. It is a letter from a world that almost entirely vanished.

Where to follow it: Fitt I (the opening summons: Hwæt), Fitt XVII (the Finn episode — a lost world within the poem), Fitt XLIII (the funeral pyre; the poem's last image).