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eventually does become king of the Geats, he seeks his own glory, rather
than sustaining the community that his mother’s family ruled.
The depiction of a good battle-leading king is found toward the end
of the text, conveniently placed right before Beowulf makes the decision
to battle the dragon. A diversion in the text that is seemingly only there
for background feudal information, the story of Ongenþeow in the Battle
of Ravenswood describes how a king should balance both his personal
glory in battle with his devotion to his queen:
Sona him se froda fæder Ohþeres,
eald ond egesfull ondslyht ageaf,
abreot brimwisan, bryd ahredde,
gomela[n] iomoewlan golde berofene,
Onelan modor and Ohþeres. (2928-2932)
[Immediately him, the wife father of Ohþere, / old and terrible,
gave in return onslaught / destroyed the sea-king, rescued the
bride, / the aged wife of old, gold-deprived / mother of Onela
and Ohþere . . .]
Ongenþeow both delivers fierce victory on the battlefield and also rescues
his queen and the mother of his children. These lines, so closely tied
together through textual delivery (Ongenþeow succeeding in battle
next to the rescue of his queen), show the ideal vision of masculinity
encompassing both success in battle and understanding of the value of
saving his queen, the unifier of his people. When Ongenþeow does these
things that are valued of kings and in ideal masculinity, he is rewarded soon
after when his community is saved: “Frofor eft gelamp / sarigmodum”
[Solace came to pass in turn / to the sad-hearted] (2941b-2942a). Mary
Dockray-Miller 5 discusses the Ongenþeow episode in-depth, pointing
to Ongeþeow as the ideal masculine role model in Beowulf suggesting
that “[Ongenþeow] preserves his masculinity intact until the end of his
life, showing that, in Beowulf, advancing age does not necessarily mean
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a movement away from masculinity” (20). Dockray-Miller does not, in
fact, link Ongenþeow’s dutiful care of his wife to his successful version of
masculinity, but referring back to the rules of decorum for kings Maxims
1, Ongenþeow fulfills the ideal of kingship by keeping a successful queen.
Some critical discussion has occurred regarding the subject of
Beowulf’s own queen but little satisfactory findings have emerged.
Fred Robinson has suggested that perhaps “Beowulf’s marital status
was of insufficient interest to warrant a mention in the poem” (118-
119). This statement, of course, is incredibly problematic given the
poem’s fascination with the extended familial narrative and the fact the
every king of Beowulf’s stature has a named queen in the text. Helen
Bennett similarly explores the topic by translating excerpts from Tilman
Westphalen’s book length study concerning the identity of the female
mourner, a discussion that basically boils down to her being “Beowulf’s
wife [or] not Beowulf’s wife” (37). 6 Bennett calls Westphalen’s theory
(that the mourner is Beowulf’s wife: a remarried Hygd) “highly
speculative” (38) and arrived at with “circular reasoning” (38), yet offers
no hypothesis of her own on the subject, spending the rest of the article
discussing the lament tradition in Anglo-Saxon works. Robert Morey
similarly disagrees that woman in these lines is Beowulf’s queen, stating
firmly “Beowulf is the only king in the poem who never marries (I am
highly skeptical that the woman introduced in line 3150 is his widow)”
(493). The speculation of the Geatish woman who laments at Beowulf’s
funeral is based on restorations of the Beowulf manuscript and is not at
all universally accepted. 7 That said, having been introduced to Hygd in
such a powerful way previously, it seems unlikely this anonymous woman
is either Hygd (theoretically now married to Beowulf) or another bride,
as the passage lacks the necessary descriptors we have come to associated
with the other queens depicted in Beowulf. 8
If we are to view Beowulf as a king in the way that Hroþgar and
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