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.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Heroism and Leadership
The world of Beowulf might seem at first to be a place of pure brawn. Beowulf can swim the ocean for weeks at a time, dive down into the mere for a full day without taking a breath, and wrestle monsters to death with his bare hands. However, these tales of superhuman power rest on a fragile structure. While the poem lauds heroism, its deeper concern is with the leadership that can spring from overvaluing it—and the risks and doubts of that leadership.
Hrothgar makes this point well in his speech of guidance to Beowulf:
Sometimes [God] allows the mind of a man
of distinguished birth to follow its bent,
grants him fulfilment and felicity on earth
and forts to command in his own country […]
until the man in his unthinkingness
forgets that it will ever end for him.
[…]The whole world
conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst
until an element of overweening
enters him and takes hold (119).
Heroism, Hrothgar explains, cannot be taken for granted, or considered exclusively one’s own virtue. The broader structures of society (and of a hero’s soul) can’t function simultaneously with this singular ability. Though heroism can confer glory, its rightful role is in relation to the culture it protects. Beowulf’s heroism is at once the flower of his culture and inadequate on its own.
This is made painfully clear at the end of the poem. After all the magnificent triumphs and treasure-gifts, the story ends on a note of fear and despair: with Beowulf gone, what can the Geats do to protect themselves? The culture’s only hope resides in Wiglaf, whose firm sense of duty and human connection moderates and socializes the heroism the poem praises.
Mortality and Christianity
The poet of Beowulf never lets anyone forget that they will one day die. The poem’s steady drumbeat of mortality reminders—which read as alien to a modern sensibility—is its most serious and ultimately life-affirming concern.
Reminders of mortality are perhaps especially important for those who could easily forget that they will die. In this world of outrageous heroism, in which humans can have the power of demigods, it takes real effort for heroes to keep their own impermanence in mind. However, even the ordinary person reading the poem may have some difficulty believing in the reality of death: Death is, after all, inherently mysterious, unimaginable.
Beowulf’s constant focus on mortality poses a philosophical question: If even Beowulf is mortal, how ought the poem’s characters and its readers conduct themselves in life?
Some of the poem’s answers spring from its craggy Christianity. One can’t read far without encountering a reference to God’s mysterious power. For instance, in one of Beowulf’s retellings of his fight with Grendel, he says: “I couldn’t stop him from slipping my hold./The Lord allowed it” (65). Here, God’s power denies Beowulf a full victory while still granting him the upper hand. The heroic thing to do in such a situation is to accept and surrender to the overarching will of God.
The poem’s Christianity, however, is not one of a glorious afterlife; while the heroes are very interested in elaborate funerals, there’s more talk of Hell than Heaven. In a world that layers Christian belief over top of ancient pagan customs, death is not a movement to a better world, but a hard and humbling wall that puts an inevitable end to this one. Human connections and humility must be forged in its face.
Storytelling
On a first encounter with Beowulf, the reader may be surprised at how many versions of the same story they hear. Beowulf fights Grendel; then Beowulf describes how he fought Grendel; then other people describe how Beowulf fought Grendel; then Beowulf goes somewhere else and describes to other people how he fought Grendel. This repetition may begin to make more sense when considered in the poem’s wider context.
Beowulf is a one-of-a-kind written record of a story born in Old English oral tradition. Storytelling was a way to communicate values, preserve culture, and have a good time. It appears in all of these roles through Beowulf’s many poems-within-poems and retellings-of-tellings. The poet, with perhaps a hint of self-satisfaction, writes of the skill and the importance of poets, who function as historians, artists, and royal retinue:
a thane
of the king’s household, a carrier of tales,
a traditional singer deeply schooled
in the lore of the past, linked a new theme
to a strict metre (59).
When the minstrels sing of Beowulf’s feats, we take on the same position as the listeners in the story’s hall. Storytelling makes what was distant immediate. Unlike the rotting treasures of the barrow-hoard, stories have staying power. In reading Beowulf now, more than 1000 years after its likely date of composition, we participate in that same telling and retelling. Storytelling is a kind of bloodline, a thread of human continuity that can—for a time—transcend death.
