An excerpt from The Art of Beowulf

Critic: Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur
Source: The Art of Beowulf, University of California Press, 1959, 283 p
Criticism about: Anonymous (?-)


[In the following excerpt, Brodeur discusses the most significant elements of Beowulf's battles with Grendel. Grendel's mother and the dragon.]

It is a far cry from any extant heroic lay to the complex and well-ordered poem of Beowulf. If that poem rests upon a number of lays, each of which presented a portion of the hero's career, then its author faced and accomplished a task much more involved than the mere joining of their narratives into a single work. He has so managed the substantially distinct parts of his hero's career that, though they constitute a deliberate balance, both exhibit the same heroic ideal; and in both parts, in triumphant death as in glorious victory, all the hero's words and deeds arise out of, and express, the same noble qualities of character.

The three great events of the main plot -- the killing of Grendel, the victory over Grendel's dam, and the fight with the dragon -- display striking structural similarities, and equally striking variety of narrative treatment. In each case, the inciting cause is very much the same: the destruction wrought by a monster; in each, the hero, after a hard and dangerous struggle, slays his foe -- though the hero himself is fatally hurt in his last fight. In each, the fight is preceded by an exposition of the hero's state of mind; the fights with Grendel and his dam are each followed by his report of the combat to Hrothgar, and by an account of the gratitude and praise heaped upon him by the Danish king. Each of Beowulf's monster-killings is undertaken to deliver a people sorely afflicted; and in each case the people involved, though saved from present affliction, is nevertheless doomed to suffer ultimate catastrophe.

Yet, within these similar frames there is wide diversity: diversity in setting, in attendant circumstance, and in manner of treatment.... In his narrative of the fight with Grendel, the poet several times assures us of a happy outcome; yet he overbalances each assurance with effects of horror so calculated and climactic, and imparts so vividly the impact of the terror of battle upon his dramatic audience, that the listeners' sense of fear and peril is maintained almost to the end. In the story of the fight with Grendel's dam he deliberately withholds any assurance that the hero will prevail; and through impressively fearful setting and vivid alternation of the fortunes of fight he keeps us anxiously uncertain of the hero's victory, or even of his survival, until the instant before the means of victory is discovered and used. It is ... quite otherwise with the dragon-fight: here we are told repeatedly that both Beowulf and the dragon will perish; and these direct forecasts are reinforced by expositions of the hero's states of mind, from just before battle is joined through each phase in the movement of the fight to the very end.

Quite evidently these differences in mood and treatment represent the author's deliberate choice: we are dealing with the work of a poet "who subdued existing narrative material to a controlling artistic purpose of his own." If what he told derives from popular and heroic tradition, the whole manner of the telling, the motivations, the characterization, the whole plan and direction of the story into a single heroic and ethical channel are the work of a fine craftsman and a great poet. Attempts to prove plural authorship, or to show that individual passages are interpolations, have shipwrecked on the tough cohesiveness of the work. The style of Beowulf is as nearly uniform as the style of so long a poem can be expected to be, and as varied as the effects at which the poet aims demanded: it is unique in power and beauty in the whole course of Old English poetry.... [So] large a proportion of the vocabulary of the poem is elsewhere unmatched that it presents every appearance of striking originality within a highly developed conventional usage. The well-designed, balanced structure which Tolkien discerned, and the pervasive irony, no less than the magnificence of language, show the hand of an artist in complete command of his material and his medium. We have, then, no reason for surprise at the fine congruity between the major stages of the action and their settings.

If we compare the narrative of Beowulf's monster-slayings in Denmark with the corresponding action in any of the analogues, we discover two sharp differences: first, the settings of the combats in Beowulf are infinitely richer and more elaborate than the settings in any other version; and secondly, the settings in the epic are not only beautifully calculated to enhance the effect of the main action, but are also so contrived as to suggest something beyond it, something at once magnificent and tragic. The settings in the first part of the poem are at once dramatic and symbolic: they reveal a present splendor and intimate its imminent ruin.

These differences reflect, of course, dissimilar levels of tradition. Even in Grettissaga the underlying folk-tale of the purging of a hall still bears the stamp of its popular origin, although the story has been somewhat rationalized and elevated in consequence of its circulation among a logical-minded people and its attachment to the historical figure of Grettir. In Beowulf it has found its way into the poetry of art, and has been transformed through association with a royal court and princely personages -- and finally through the genius of a great poet -- into the stuff of heroic poetry.

The story of the purging of a hall of an invading monster or pair of monsters came to the author of Beowulf -- as it later reached the compiler of Grettissaga -- in a form which required two distinct though not widely separated settings: the haunted hall, and the lair of the trolls that ravaged it. The more formidable of the two trolls made a practice of raiding the hall for his victims; the hero's first fight therefore took place (or, as in Grettissaga, began) in the hall. The second troll had to be sought out and destroyed in its lair. For us it is a minor matter that, in Grettissaga, it is the female monster which raids the hall and is killed first; it is of greater importance that both in the saga and in Beowulf the she-troll is the more dangerous adversary.

The differences in the action of these two versions concern us less than the differences in setting. In Grettissaga the hall is the house of a farmer; in Beowulf it is a royal residence. In Grettissaga the abode of the monsters is a cave behind a waterfall in a river-gorge near the house: the terrain is rough and mountainous, but it has none of the trappings of terror which envelop the Haunted Mere. Hrothgar's description of the region, and the poet's account of the march to it, seem to imply that a considerable distance separates it from Heorot.

These differences, to a degree, accurately reflect the differences between the cultural level, and the milieu, of the two versions: farmers' dwellings are common in Iceland, royal halls non-existent; and, ... the Sandhauger episode in Grettissaga is relatively close to the folk-tale. But the poet of Beowulf was not content to use Heorot simply as the scene of the fight with Grendel; it is also the splendid and luxurious home of Hrothgar, and the setting of nearly all of Part I. We see the personages -- Beowulf and his followers as well as the Danes -- inhabiting this royal residence, enjoying all its pleasures and amenities: it is, indeed, the most comprehensive and detailed picture of Germanic aristocratic life that has come down to us from any source. The scene as a royal court was supplied by the poet's source; its lavish embellishment, its luxury and splendor, the courtesy and charm of the life within it so vividly pictured, are the gift of the poet. So, too, many of the features of the Haunted Mere may have been present in the poet's source; but it was certainly our poet who first perceived how admirably they could be used to envelop the fight with Grendel's dam in an atmosphere of terror.

Neither in Grettissaga nor in any of the folk-tale analogues is there any clear and logical link between the two monster-slayings: the second, where it exists, is motivated weakly or not at all. In Grettissaga the hero visits the gorge and finds the second troll merely out of curiosity: he does not expect to find another monster. The connection between the settings is the simplest possible: the house at Sandhaugar lies near the river. The two stages of the action are almost wholly unconnected. (pp. 108-12)

The very nature of the theme -- the purging of a hall -- requires the fight with Grendel to be staged in Heorot; the fury of the struggle is dramatically conveyed through the poet's report of its terrific din, the breaking of benches, and the almost shattering effect of the struggle upon the building itself. It is in the hall, too, that Æschere is killed; there, too, that Beowulf and his men receive rich rewards at the feast in celebration of the victory over Grendel; there that Beowulf brings his trophies, after the second combat, to astonish the Danes who had thought him slain. The unity of the action is provided by the hall Heorot itself.... (p. 113)

It might seem somewhat surprising that this combat with Grendel, fought to purge Heorot, should prove so much less dangerous to the hero than the fight with Grendel's dam. Yet it is so as well in all those analogues which preserve the twofold fight: the female monster is a much more desperate adversary than the male. Grettir, like Beowulf, is in grave danger of death in his fight with the she-troll, and has little difficulty disposing of her male companion. It is characteristic of stories of trolls that the female is the more aggressive and the more terrible opponent: few male monsters compare for sheer horror with the man-eating, hall-raiding she-troll killed by Arnljot Gellini; she is very like to her counterpart at Sandhaugar, and to Grendel's dam. The poet of Beowulf, in representing the male Grendel as the persistent and terrible raider of the hall, and permitting the female to invade Heorot only as her son's avenger, departed from an ancient and common pattern. We cannot tell whether this departure was of his own devising, or whether he found it in his source; at least, in the poet's hands the departure proved most fortunate, for it permitted him to order his hero's exploits climactically. It also involved him in a grave difficulty, which he resolved brilliantly.

The difficulty has left its marks on the story of the fight with Grendel: in spite of the long and horrific record of Grendel's ravages in Heorot, in spite of the carefully built effects of terror in Grendel's last march upon the hall, his horrible appearance within the door, and the devouring of Hondscio, Grendel does not give Beowulf a really good fight. Though capable of killing thirty Danish thanes in one night, there is no aggression left in him once he feels the power of Beowulf's grip; he struggles not to destroy, but to escape. Since there is little glory in an easy victory, the poet was compelled to find effective means of making Grendel seem a more dangerous enemy than he was. He achieved this precisely by making the most of Grendel's ruthless ravages among the Danes, by constructing for his last invasion of Heorot a tremendous machinery of terror, culminating in the ghastly devouring of Hondscio, and by imparting the sense of panic produced among the Danes by the din of the fight and Grendel's shrieks of pain. After the fight is over, the awesome power of Grendel is further communicated by the description of his monstrous hand and arm. Very skillfully the poet has made the fight seem worthy of the prize; actually it is not.

The poet was sufficiently remote from popular tradition to feel compelled to represent Grendel's dam as inferior in strength to her son; but the compulsions of his story could not be wholly escaped. His hero must come closer to death in the second struggle than in the first. His artistic sense pushed him in that same direction; therefore, having committed himself to the untraditional but logical admission that the she-troll was not so strong as Grendel, he was obliged so to manage Beowulf's combat with her as to place him in mortal danger. This he accomplished ... through his skillful management of the conditions of the fight: Beowulf is seized unaware in the water, taken by surprise, and dragged down into a milieu unfamiliar to him and favorable to his antagonist. The poet's representation of the Haunted Mere is not the consequence of failure to apprehend the nature of the setting in the folk-tale; it results from the necessity resting upon him to fashion the setting so that it will both oppress the hero's spirit and place in his way obstacles calculated to prevent him from using his strength to best advantage. This he has done, and done triumphantly: for his description of the region of the mere not only accounts for the terror of the combat, but also constitutes one of the glories of the poem. (pp. 113-15)

[The poet] brings before us a twofold dramatic contrast. Against the magnificence of Heorot, the very building of which was so glorious an act, the ruthless incursions of Grendel and his dam stand out with greater horror; and after Grendel's death, the future treachery and murder of Kinsmen afford a still more tragic contrast with present pride and glory. The first of these contrasts gives vividness and shocking force to the main action; the second lends tragic pathos to the matter of the subplot. After the slaying of Grendel, the darker side of the first contrast is represented by the killing of Æschere; the second contrast is subtly suggested in the narrative of the feast in Heorot.

Six hundred and sixty lines separate the conclusion of the fight with Grendel from Beowulf's encounter with Grendel's dam. This lull in the main action is occupied by an account of the celebrations of Grendel's death by the jubilant Danish warriors, and by a much longer account of the feast. (pp. 115-16)

The scene, stately and splendid, is suffused with tragic irony, displayed in two contexts. First, against the joy, the seemliness, and the splendor of the feast and the gift-giving, the poet reminds us that these Danes, still united in fellowship and loyalty, and imagining neither treason nor rebellion, will one day be divided by civil war; secondly, even as Hrothgar and his men leave the banquet and go to bed with full confidence that their afflictions are ended, the poet warns us that they are to be tragically disillusioned. The warning in lines 1233b-37a and 1240b-41 points in both directions; the lines following it reinforce the irony with a ringing affirmation of the vigilant valor with which the Danish warriors, full-armed, guard the hall -- in vain.

The feast is treated at great length and con amore; on the surface, it exhibits every outward aspect of noble and generous conduct; underneath, it is omnious and threatening. Whatever basis there may have been in the poet's sources for a scene of jubilation, these tragic undercurrents, and the dramatic irony which edges the poet's treatment of his minor theme, are certainly his own; for them there could have been no model. Much of the external splendor of the scene must also have been of his creation; and there can hardly have been any source other than the poet's perceptive imagination for the balancing, against that magnificent background, of the hidden clash of loyalty with ambition, the rising conflict of opposed interests, and the subtly dramatic use of the queen's attempt to forestall fate. It is not the pageantry of the feast, but the manner in which the author places his personages within its setting and invests them with tragic meaning, which gives the scene its greatness. As, in the Odyssey, Homer used the visit of Telemachus to the court of Menelaus to exhibit the unhappy fortunes of the great Achaan lords after the fall of Troy, so the poet of Beowulf employs the feast in Heorot to foreshadow the ruin of the noble house of the Shieldings.

The poet's love of contrast has been frequently remarked; but it neither springs from a propensity to didacticism nor reflects undue preoccupation with "the unwar wo or harm that comth behynde." Contrast is the essence of all tragedy; and Beowulf is a tragedy. (pp. 116-17)

The most obvious contrast within Part I is that between the settings of the two combats: one, the stately and luxurious hall of Hrothgar and the gallant life of heroes for which it was designed; and the other, the terrible landscape of the Haunted Mere. The first envelops darker and deeper contrasts: first and most immediately important, that between the joys for which the hall was built and the bloody persecution of its inmates by Grendel; secondly, the contrast between the present solidarity and good-will among the Danes, and the treason and bloodshed to be enkindled by Hrothulf's ambition. The first warning of the troublous times in store for Hrothgar's realm occurs immediately after the announcement of his greatest peaceful triumph, the completion of Heorot and his munificence within it: "The hall towered, lofty and wide-gabled; it awaited the surges of battle, hostile fire; nor was it long until that edged hate between father-in-law and son-in-law was destined to awaken in furtherance of murderous hostility." Although Hrothgar and Hrothulf were to beat back the invasion of the Heaðobards, the stately hall was to be destroyed.

The setting for the second combat contains no such contrasts; but ... the perfect congruence between it and the action within it is followed by a swift succession of striking dramatic contrasts. (pp. 117-18)

The contrast between present joy and future catastrophe in the narrative of Part I is afforded by the balance between the glorious events of the main action and the tragic subplot; by the underlying antithesis between the hero as God's instrument against the kin of Cain and the hero as prince and statesman vainly intervening in purely human affairs and frustrated by Fate. In Part II, Fate has tipped the balance against the hero, and this contrast vanishes; instead, the poet constantly confronts us with the contrast between past and present; between the heroic youth that has been and the heroic old age that has lost nothing of youth's courage and little of its strength, but well-nigh everything of its good fortune. Indeed, Part II is one long, mournful contrast to the splendor and glory of Part I. The mighty nation of the Geats has become weak; the hero is doomed to die, and his people to suffer conquest. This contrast is so swiftly introduced that it strikes us with sudden shock.... (p. 122)

The beautifully conceived interchange between Beowulf and Hygelac with which Part I concludes leaves the listener in precisely the state of mind which the poet must have intended. At this moment Beowulf is in the flower of youth and strength, and at the height of this renown; the Geatish kingdom is at the peak of its power. The great king has a matchless champion as his right-hand man, and they are united in a deep and abiding love. Hard upon this triumphant note comes, at once, the crashing dissonance of the opening of Part II. In a few breathless lines the poet announces the sequent fatalities which have weakened the Geats and left them ringed round with powerful enemies. Hygelac has fallen; his son Heardred has been slain in battle with the Svear. Beowulf has come to the throne, and has held it well for fifty winters -- until a dragon ravages his land. The eleventh line, with its fateful until, forecasts the hero's own fall, which is to entail the ruin of his people. Of all the many contrasts in the poem, this is the most dramatic. Here, at the outset of the last action, the tragic close in anticipated.

It is a first principle of storytelling that setting must be appropriate to the action which unfolds within it. The major action of the second part of Beowulf is the dragon-fight; its causes are the theft of a precious vessel from the dragon's hoard, and the dragon's savage retaliation upon the Geats. Its vengeance is swift and terrible.... The hero must now meet the dragon, and both must die. (pp. 125-26)

The main action calls for one major setting: the barrow in which the dragon guards its treasure, with its immediate environs; and one minor setting, which is so barely sketched that one can hardly visualize it at all: that of Beowulf's cremation and entombment.

The major setting lacks the fullness, the complexity, and the vividness of detail which give brilliance to the settings of Part I (the hall Heorot, and the landscape of the mere). This is as it should be, in view of the singleness and the simple directness of the action of Part II. The second part of the poem concentrates upon the dragon-fight and its consequences for the hero and his people; there are no complicating factors. (p. 126)

The setting ... is in its general outlines fixed by tradition; the poet elaborates the conventional aspects of a dragon's lair only by a somewhat detailed description of the barrow, and of the treasure contained in it as that treasure is examined by Wiglaf after the dragon's death. Those elements which impress one as of the poet's invention are the burning brook, the rocky approaches to the barrow, the stone "seat" on which Wiglaf sits to gaze on the stone "arches" of the barrow; and the account of the treasure (lines 2757-70). (p. 128)

The narrative of the dragon-fight is swift and furious; except for the lines which set forth the flight of Beowulf's thanes and explain the role of Wiglaf and the origin of his sword, it is uninterrupted. This single break is essential: the desertion of the thanes is required, to give full plausibility to the representation of Beowulf's mortal peril. The hero's men had not deserted him in his fight with Grendel, nor even at the Haunted Mere, when they thought him slain. It is the panic of all but one of his bravest men which convinces us that, in the dragon, he faces a foe far more terrible than Grendel or Grendel's dam. The intervention of Wiglaf is equally necessary, both to demonstrate the extremity of the hero's peril and to supply him, in his darkest hour, with a companion as loyal as he himself had been to Hygelac. Moreover, it is the devoted gallantry of Wiglaf which justifies Beowulf's sacrifice: if none of the Geats had stood by him, we should feel that their impending conquest by the Svear was fully justified, and that Beowulf's death for them was a futile gesture. Moreover the poet wished to assure us that, fatal as it was to prove to his people, Beowulf's fall did not leave the Geats utterly leaderless.

The main action, then, vigorous and fierce, and in the main uninterrupted, is enclosed in a setting the major elements of which are traditional, but which the poet has elaborated in his description of the barrow and the treasure. It remains, however, a setting appropriately lean and stark. This is to the good: in a more elaborate setting the action would have lost something of its fury and its force.

The minor setting, in the two scenes of Beowulf's burning and interment, is very lightly suggested. Poetic names adorn these scenes: the place of cremation is called Hrones-nos; the site of Beowulf's burial mound is Earna-nos; both are close to the sea. The mound is "high and broad, widely visible to seafarers"; a seemly wall is wrought about the hero's ashes, and the treasure is buried with him. The fashion of his pyre, and the account of his burning, resemble rather closely the details of the burning of the warriors slain at Finnsburg (lines 1107-24); in both instances the pyre is hung with armor, and the dead placed amidst the helms and corselets; flame roars, and smoke ascends to heaven. In both, moreover, the principal mourner is a woman: Hildeburg in the one case, and apparently Beowulf's widow in the other. (pp. 129-30)

Nevertheless the accounts of the burning of the dead Danish and Frisian warriors after Finnsburg and the cremation of Beowulf differ in two significant respects. First, although the ritual details are very similar, they are expressed in different terms: if the elements of the two descriptions are essentially conventional, the conventionality is not evident in the diction. Secondly, the lamentation of Hildeburg expresses simply her grief for those slain at Finnsburg; the grief of the woman who mourns for Beowulf is not only for his death, but for its consequences to herself and to the Geatish people.... The mourning of "Beowulf's widow" reinforces the forecasts of Wiglaf and the Messenger with respect to the downfall of the Geatish nation; it is symbolic rather than personal. Klaeber is wrong, then, in believing that "she was introduced, awkwardly enough, merely in the interest of a conventional motive"; the fears expressed in her lamentation afford the last and strongest intimation of the ruin to fall upon Beowulf's people through his death. Justly enough, Beowulf's warriors chant around his ashes the praises of their dead lord; the woman clearly sees, and grieves for, the destruction of his people. (pp. 130-31)

Source:  Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, in his The Art of Beowulf, University of California Press, 1959, 283 p.

Source Database:  Literature Resource Center