Beowulf (3 page)

The poet-narrator has already made it clear that Grendel is one of those forces of evil—“a fiend from hell” (line 101)—and that the struggle to come would be, as in the past, a struggle between God and the dark diabolical Enemy:

Thus, Beowulf’s coming fight with Grendel is placed within the context of the cosmic combat between God and the Devil, with Beowulf by implication serving as God’s champion in the great contest. Later on, in the fight down in the mere against Grendel’s mother, this implication is made quite explicit.

Beowulf had defeated Grendel, but Grendel’s mother stormed into Heorot to avenge her son by killing one of the chieftains among the warriors. The feud has been renewed. So Beowulf must now seek vengeance for the beloved Dane. He swims down through the treacherous waters of the mere to her underground lair, and he engages her in the kind of hand-to-hand combat that had been successful against her son. As they wrestle, she manages to exert all her strength, so he slips and falls. She then sits astride his body and attempts to pierce through his ringed-mail shirt with her dagger:

Once again, we not only have a dramatic presentation of action, but also the poet-narrator’s commentary on the significance of that action. This happens again and again throughout the epic, so that the back-and-forth movement between action and commentary becomes a kind of dialectic joining the major themes of the heroic warrior culture (in action) and the new perspective of Christian belief (in commentary). This dialectic is so fundamental to the thematic structure of
Beowulf
that it is a major factor in the unity of the whole.

 

As noted earlier, most scholars have followed Tolkien in regarding
Beowulf
as essentially unified, though there has been some disagreement about the nature of this unity, and a few scholars have begun to question the need to claim some form of unity in the work—as if to justify our continuing admiration for the epic. But let us leave aside these debates for the time being and concentrate on what the poem presents us as its narrative structure. For example, it is clear that the main line of the story features the character and actions of Beowulf himself, yet it is also clear that Beowulf is represented in quite different ways in the early action and in the later stages of the narrative. Taking an overall view, we can see three major episodes in his life as warrior hero: his fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. Still taking this overall view, we can also see that the life of the hero divides into two parts. First we learn of his youthful exploits in Denmark defending Hrothgar’s hall and the people against Grendel and Grendel’s mother. Then, after a transitional section explaining how Beowulf came to be king of the Geats, we are told simply that he ruled “for fifty winters” until the terror of the night-flying dragon called him forth to his final battle. Thus, the narrative structure appears as threefold or twofold, depending on which set of features is brought into clearest focus, the fights with the monsters or the stages in the hero’s life and career.

At this point, we might simply agree with Tolkien and others that the epic is constructed around a set of oppositions—youth versus age, light versus dark, heroic versus elegiac, and so forth. Here we have the conception of “organic unity” promoted by the famous Romantic poet and theorist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who saw such unity in the ways opposing forces in a work may be held in a state of tension balanced against one another. Thus, in
Beowulf
one could see a balancing of symbolic oppositions in the two-part structure of the whole: for example, in the representation of the young, vigorous, self-confident hero fighting Grendel and Grendel’s mother as poised in a kind of dialectical relationship with the later depiction of Beowulf as old, no longer able to fight without weapons, somewhat doubtful of his prowess, and fatally wounded by the dragon’s fangs. Or, perhaps one might see this unity-in-opposition in the depictions of Beowulf first as hero and loyal follower, and then later as a king responsible for the protection and welfare of his people.

In this view, there is ultimately a tragic irony in the hero becoming king and still trying to act out the role of heroic warrior, which leads not only to his own fall but that of his people as well, as predicted by Wiglaf, the Messenger, and the woman mourner at the end of the epic. Here, too, we have an overall unity of the twofold structure in which neither part by itself could produce this tragic irony. But do such interpretations really solve the questions of unity in the narrative? Up to this point, the argument for unity has focused on the character of the hero. Clearly, the great fights that engage most of our interest in the poem are related to one another through unity of character. But what happens if we shift our focus to the numerous actions that constitute the plotting of the narrative?

When we descend from the heights from which we might see
Beowulf
as a whole, we find ourselves in a narrative that does not simply move in a straight line, but that moves forward and backward, with various side trips into stories that sometimes involve Beowulf and sometimes do not. Here we are confronted with another kind of question about unity. Do we work to reconcile the seeming “digressions” with the main plot, thereby defending the narrative against charges of disunity, or do we simply accept the very looseness of the structure as the inevitable consequence of its being the kind of work it is, and produced according to aesthetic norms very different from those promoted by, say, Aristotle?

The case for the defense of unity has typically rested on essentially Aristotelian grounds. In his
Poetics,
Aristotle presents his own famous conception of “organic unity,” a biological metaphor in which all parts must serve functions integrally related to one another and therefore to the whole. Moreover, Aristotle claims that what makes “poetry more philosophical than history” is that history presents events as they occurred in temporal order, whereas poetry seeks, or should seek, for the often underlying causal connections among events, whether these events actually occurred or not. But he does not leave matters there. Aristotle provides two tests for “organic unity”: If a part of a narrative can be either placed in another position, or even removed altogether, without disrupting the plot, then the plot is not truly organically unified. Yet it is only fair to add that Aristotle appears to have allowed for degrees of unity in plot construction. His ideal model was
Oedipus the King,
and when he spoke of Homer, he found the epic to be less tightly unified—and presumably less esthetically satisfying—than his favorite play. Now, if we apply these norms to
Beowulf,
as many have done, we encounter a whole set of problems rather different from those described above in the twofold or threefold structural models. But these problems will only become evident by analyzing some specific passages in detail.

Let us begin with the beginning. The narrative does not begin with Beowulf, or even in his homeland of the Geats, but rather with a genealogy of Danish kings. The poet-narrator reminds his audience that they have heard tales told about the Spear-Danes (one of several epithets applied to them), and he proceeds to describe the power that King Scyld, founder of the royal line, exercised over his own people and over neighboring peoples as well, leading up to the observation, “That was a good king!” We then enter the borderline between myth and legendary history as we learn of the mysterious coming of Scyld to his people as a child, followed by his kingship and his fathering a successor, before dying and being given a spectacular funeral in his ship, which is then cast adrift on the tide to take him on his last journey. His son is Beow, who in turn fathers the father of Hrothgar, who is the Danish king at the time of the poem. Only then do we hear of the building of Hrothgar’s great hall, Heorot, which is the site for the bloody man-eating raids by the monster Grendel. Oral reports of these raids reach Beowulf across the sea in Geatland (apparently in southern Sweden), whose journey to aid Hrothgar against Grendel begins the main plot of the work.

The prologue might seem to be rather lengthy to a modern reader, but in the world of
Beowulf
people are always concerned about origins, and even the principal characters are often referred to by their father’s names. Such origins would appear to define a person’s nature and quality, and thus to dispense with them would be unthinkable. So it is not hard to see how this culture would regard the Danish genealogy as integral to the narrative. Moreover, the epic concludes with another funeral by the sea, when Beowulf is cremated and his barrow is raised as a monument, so there is a symmetry in the plot beginning and ending with funerals.

A somewhat different case is the function of the story of Sigemund, especially as it is immediately followed by the story of Heremod. The tale of the legendary Germanic hero Sigemund is sung by Hrothgar’s scop, a teller of traditional tales, during the high-spirited celebration after Beowulf’s victory over Grendel. In the scop’s version, Sigemund’s early career had already established his fame as a warrior, but then came his greatest achievement:

The connection of this tale of monster-slaying with the main plot is obvious: It implicitly compares Beowulf, who has just killed the monster Grendel, with the mythical hero Sigemund, thus serving as a kind of indirect praise poem to honor Beowulf. In addition, this tale anticipates Beowulf’s own fight with the dragon at the conclusion of the epic, though, unlike Sigemund, he ends that fight as a tragic hero. Thus, we may conclude that the tale of Sigemund is not a “digression” at all.

Then, after three lines continuing the praise of Sigemund, the narrative rather abruptly changes course, asserting that this mythic hero outshone Heremod in noble deeds. It seems from other references in the poem that Heremod was a Danish king who preceded the Scyld described at the beginning. Heremod is presented here as a negative model of kingship, the source of much suffering among his people until he was betrayed and assassinated while among the Jutes. Then a connection is made, though a negative one, with Beowulf:

Then the narrative returns to a description of the Danes who are celebrating Beowulf’s victory. There are several points here that require explanation. First, if the implied comparison of Beowulf with Sigemund functions to praise Beowulf, so also does the contrast between Heremod and Beowulf function to praise Beowulf. And since both heroes are presented in contrast to the antihero, they are once again, at least by implication, compared with each other in nobility. Second, who is doing the praising or condemning here? The scop is not quoted directly; we only hear him through the voice of the poet-narrator :

Yet the poet-narrator does not claim that the scop compared Beowulf with Sigemund, though the implication is certainly there. We also do not know when the scop ends his song, and therefore we do not know whether the contrasts of Sigemund and Beowulf with Heremod are made by the scop or by the poet-narrator of the poem as a whole. Even so, the voice we do hear is that of the poet-narrator, and it appears that it is he who makes the comparisons and contrasts. Otherwise, why not simply quote the scop?

We may further note that the logic here is not the logic of Aristotle. The connections are neither causal nor even temporal, but they do follow the logic of association, and this logic is a typical strategy throughout the epic, taking various forms. The poet-narrator begins a story, which by a process of association reminds him of another story, and so he appears to “digress.” But the point is that he returns to the original story, which now provides a frame or context in which the associated story has meaning. At the same time, what may at first seem to be a digression turns out to give new meaning to the story into which it is inserted. This pattern can be found throughout
Beowulf,
and it provides further evidence of the artistic complexity of the work. At the same time, we may recognize in this pattern a narrative strategy that is common in oral storytelling—a point to which we shall return in the discussion of oral composition.