39 pages • 1 hour read
Transl. Seamus HeaneyBeowulf
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Treasure
The clans of Beowulf might seem, to a modern reader, overly obsessed with treasure. The most fundamental power structures of this world are built on treasure: Kingship is maintained through lavish gifts, to the extent that kings are known as “ring-givers.” However, one need only replace “treasure” with “money” to see a certain resemblance to contemporary society here.
The treasures of Beowulf play a more complex role, representing the power of wealth and the goods of the material world more generally—in both their value and their fragility. This becomes plain in the lament of the lonely barrow-hoarder, whose grief over his dead people is symbolized by their treasures rotting underground:
I am left with nobody
to bear a sword or burnish plated goblets,
put a sheen on the cup. The companies have departed.
The hard helmet, hasped with gold,
will be stripped of its hoops; and the helmet-shiner
who should polish the metal of the war-mask sleeps;
the coat of mail that came through all fights,
through shield-collapse and cut of sword,
decays with the warrior (153).
Treasure, like humans, only goes back into the earth in the end. Beowulf’s images of treasure wrap up the good of social bonding, the beauty of culture, and the ultimate mortality of all these earthly things.
Monsters
Beowulf describes some of the most famous monsters in English literature, and does so with macabre relish. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the Dragon are all described vividly, but with plenty of room for the reader to insert their own deepest fears. The poem is remarkable for considering these creatures from the inside: these are not opaque bogeymen, but sapient individuals, who desire, feel, and suffer.
Grendel and Grendel’s mother represent the darkness in every human heart. The poet describes them as envious, vengeful, and bloodthirsty—all qualities that we see the heroes of the poem struggling with both internally and externally. They are, as well, the monsters that this particular culture creates, the shadows it throws: They are maternal and “fatherless” beings in a patriarchal society, greedy and rapacious in a kinship structure founded on gift giving, and indiscriminately bloodthirsty in a culture that prides itself on honorable and rule-bound fighting.
The Dragon, meanwhile, gets at the issues raised in the discussion of “Treasure” above. Poisonous and fiery, willing to destroy everything to defend its treasure-hoard, the Dragon embodies the deadly folly of materialism—that fundamental human urge to look away from God and from the mortality that the poem takes such pains to explicate. Unlike the grotesque Grendel and his loathsome mother, the Dragon has a certain shimmery beauty, as here eulogized by the poet: “Never again would he glitter and glide/and show himself off in midnight air” (191). Like the dragon, the things of this world are both deadly and attractive.
Patriarchy
Beowulf begins with a lengthy account of Hrothgar’s male line of descent; similar introductions pop up whenever a new character arrives. These chronicles may feel familiar to those who have encountered similarly interminable family trees in the Bible: They emphasize the significance of paternal ancestry.
Ancestry in Beowulf is not about kingship in the sense of primogeniture—among the clans, any man can be king if he proves himself adequately—but about connection to a wider patriarchal culture. The idea of fatherhood reaches beyond ties of blood. Hrothgar, for instance, adopts Beowulf as his honorary son, and Beowulf feels filial affection both for him and for his foster father Hrethel. Paternity, in this world, is at once fundamental and flexible. A father is not merely the man who sired you, but the man who loves and teaches you.
These ideas of fatherhood grow from the poem’s Christian underpinnings. As the poet often reminds us, God’s beneficent and terrible power is a kind of fatherhood, and humans owe to God what children owe to fathers: gratitude, respect, and obedience. When, before his battle with Grendel, Beowulf prays, “may the Divine Lord/in His wisdom grant the glory of victory/to whichever side He sees fit,” he reveals the fundamental commitment to childlike submission that underlies all the poem’s heroics.
Fatherhood is also connected to mortality. As the touching “Father’s Lament” demonstrates, to be a father is to open oneself to the possibility of tremendous grief. Of course, to be a son is, more likely than not, to mourn a father one day. The very nature of fatherly connection requires the characters to grapple with mortality.
The motif of fatherhood unites the poem’s complex and sometimes contradictory ideas about power, loyalty, death, and connection.
