THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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and community. Around these stories others are woven, stories which serve to broaden the context to a larger
civilization and tradition. While the humans gather in the warmth and comradeship of the mead-hall, the monsters
come from a bleak and unfriendly outside, contrasts which suggest starkly alternating phases of the social and the
alien. Human society is seen as being bound together by ties of loyalty-the lord providing protection, nourishment, and
a place in an accepted hierarchy for which his warriors return service. The lord is the bountiful ‘ring-giver’, the ‘goldfriend’,
the rewarder of Beowulf’s bravery, and the founder of feasts. Beyond this predominantly masculine hierarchy
of acknowledged ties and obligations, centred at the beginning of the poem on King Hrothgar’s court at Heorot, there
lies another order, or rather disorder, of creatures intent on destroying both king and court. Grendel the predator
stalks at night, dwelling apart from men and from faith. It is Beowulf who challenges the intruder, who drives the
wounded monster back to his lair in the wilderness and kills him. When Grendel’s enraged mother mounts a new
attack on Heorot, and Beowulf and his companions pursue her to her watery retreat, there follows a further evocation
of uninhabitable deserts, of empty fens and bleak sea-cliffs. It is in such passages that the poet suggests the gulf still
fixed between the social world of humankind and the insecure, cold, untamed world of the beasts, the inheritance of
the outcast, the exile, and the outsider.
Beowulf’s victory over Grendel in the wastes of Denmark is compared by King Hrothgar’s scop to those of the
great dragon-slayer of Teutonic legend, Sigemund. To the poem’s original audience such a comparison would
probably have suggested that Beowulf’s heroic progress would lead, just as inexorably as Sigemund's, to new
encounters with monsters and, ultimately, to his undoing by death. The parallel carried with it a grand and tragic
irony appropriate to epic. When Beowulf enters what will prove to be his final struggle with a dragon, he seems to be
a more troubled man, one haunted by an awareness of fate, the looming sense of destiny that the Anglo-Saxons
referred to as wyrd. He who has lived by his determining ancestral inheritance, the sword, must now die by it.
Beowulf, betrayed by those of his liegemen who have feared the fight, leaves a realm threatened by neighbouring
princes anxious to exploit the political vacuum left by the death of so effective a hero. The poem ends in mourning
and with the hero’s ashes paganly interred in a barrow surrounded by splendidly wrought treasures of the kind that
were discovered at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. The last lines of Beowulf evoke a pre-Christian spectacle, but the
poem’s insistent stress on mortality and on the determining nature of wyrd might equally have conveyed to a
Christian audience a message of heroic submission to the just commands of a benevolent but almighty God.
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The Battle of Maldon and the Elegies
The system of social and military loyalties evoked throughout Beowulf is reflected elsewhere in Old English literature.
In the fragmentary poem known as The Battle of Maldon (written c. 1000) a fatal skirmish between the Essex
nobleman, Byrhtnoth, and a raiding party of Vikings is celebrated. The ‘battle’ which took place in 991, seems to
have stirred its latter-day poet, possibly a monastic one, into echoing an older heroic style and into exploring the
tensions inherent in the heroic code of action. Byrhtnoth is seen as something more than a brave, if rash, warrior. In
some senses he is a martyr, generously throwing away his life, and those of his loyal vassals, for the sake of his liegelord
(King Ethelred) and for his nation (‘folc and foldan’). Yet his ‘martyrdom’ is ambiguous. His rashness in
allowing the Danes to cross the river which should have formed his best line of defence, and his consequent defeat at
their hands, may be viewed by the poet as a sacrifice for Christian culture against a pagan enemy, but there are also
suggestions that the spirit of loyalty and fraternity amongst Byrhtnoth’s men particularly matters because God is
potentially indifferent to their fate. Deor offers a complete contrast, albeit one which illuminates a similarly pervasive
stress on loyalty and on the mutual relationship of a lordly patron and his vassal. The poem, spoken in the first
person, purports to be the lament of a scop who has been supplanted by a rival. Deor’s self-consolation takes the form
of a meditation on five instances of misfortune, all of them drawn from Germanic legend and history; in each case, he
assures himself, the sorrow passed away, so likewise may the pain of his rejection pass. Each meditation ends with an
echoed refrain, with its concluding section moving beyond a broadly pagan endurance of the rule of fate into a
Christian assertion of faith in divine providence.
Widsith also takes the form of a soliloquy spoken by an imaginary scop, here a ‘far-wanderer’ who ‘unlocks his
word-hoard’ in order to describe the peoples and princes amongst whom he has journeyed. His catalogue of nations is
predominantly Teutonic, but the peripatetic poet, proudly manifesting his knowledge of the Bible, also includes the
Jews, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians. He also carefully emphasizes the rewards given to
him by discerning patrons, both a reference to past generosity and to the traditional interdependence of poet and