THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

drawing from a ‘word-hoard’ of elevated language and terminology, would be expected to perform his verses at
celebratory gatherings in the royal, lordly, and even monastic halls which figure so prominently in the literature of the
period. The writer of Beowulf speaks, for example, of ‘the clear song of the scop’ (’swutol sang scopes’) (l. 90) and of
a poet, ‘a thane of the king’s ... who remembered many traditional stories and improvised new verses’ (ll. 867-71).
The vitality of the relationship of a scop to his lord, and the dire social misfortune attendant on the loss of such
patronage, also feature in the elegiac poem known as Deor, a poem which dwells purposefully, and somewhat
mournfully, on the importance of the poet’s memorializing. The scop’s inherited pattern of poetry-making derived
from an art which was essentially oral in its origins and development. Old English verse uses a complex pattern of
alliteration as the basis of its form. Elaborately constructed sentences, and interweaving words and phrases are shaped
into two-stressed half lines of a varying number of syllables; the half lines are then linked into full-lines by means of
alliteration borne on the first stress of the second half line. The dying speech of Beowulf, commanding the
construction ofa barrow to his memory, suggests something of the steady majesty this verse can carry:
[p. 21]
HataD heaDomære hlæw gewyrcean
beorhtne æfter bæle æt brimes nosan;
se scel to gemyndum minum leodum
heah hlifian on Hronesnæsse,
þæt hit sæli Dend syDDan hatan
Biowulfes biorh, Da De brentingas
ofer floda genipu feorran drifaD.
(Command the warriors famed in battle build a bright mound after my burning at the sea headland. It shall tower high
on Whale Ness, a reminder to my people, so that seafarers may afterwards call it Beowulf’s barrow when they drive
their ships from afar over the dark waves.)
Beowulf
It was long held that the most substantial surviving Old English poem, Beowulf, was a pre-Christian composition
which had somehow been tampered with by monastic scribes in order to give it an acceptably Christian frame of
reference. This argument is no longer tenable, though some scholars hold that the tenth-century manuscript of the
poem may postdate its composition by as much as three or even four hundred years. The anonymous poet-narrator
recognizes that his story is a pagan one and that his characters hold to pagan virtues and to a pre-Christian worldview,
but he is also aware that older concepts of heroism and heroic action can be viewed as compatible with his own
religious and moral values. Beowulf refers back to an age of monster slayings in Scandinavia, but it interprets them as
struggles between good and evil, between humanity and the destructive forces which undo human order. Grendel, the
first monster of the poem, is seen as ‘Godes andsaca’, the enemy of God (l. 1682) and as a descendant of the biblical
Cain, the first murderer (l. 107). The poem’s original audience must have shared this mixed culture, one which
readily responded to references to an ancestral world and one which also recognized the relevance of primitive
heroism to a Christian society. As other surviving Old English poems suggest, Christ’s acts in redeeming the world,
and the missions and martyrdoms of his saints, could be interpreted according to supra-biblical concepts of the hero.
In a sense, a poem like Beowulf mediates between a settled and an unsettled culture, between one which enjoys the
benefits of a stable, ordered, agricultural society and one which relished the restlessness of the wandering warrior
hero. Despite the fact that the bards of the royal hall at Heorot sing of God’s Creation much as Cædmon sang of it,
Beowulf springs from a religious culture which saw infinite mystery in the natural world, and the world itself as if
hidden by a veil. It saw in nature a mass of confused signs, portents, and meanings. Marvels and horrors, such as
Grendel, his kin, and the dragon, suggested that there was a multiplicity in divine purposes. By properly
understanding God’s marvels, his will could also be understood; by battling against manifestations of evil, his
purposes could be realized.
Beowulf can properly be called an ‘epic’ poem in the sense that it celebrates the achievements of a hero in
narrative verse. Although it may strike some readers as casually episodic when compared to the ostensibly tighter
narrative structures of Homer or Virgil, the poem is in fact constructed around three encounters with the otherworldly,
with monsters who seem to interrupt the narrative by literally intruding themselves into accounts of human
celebration