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The Two Anglo-Saxon Poems
There is reason to believe that Beowulf (Part I) , Beowulf (Part II) and Maldon
make up a sequence. Beowulf (Part I) relates the complete success of the ‘good’,
the second part its complete failure. In Maldon the ideal of the ‘good’ is revived, but
the reality in which it is expected to be practised makes it difficult to live up to this
ideal. There is, however, no doubt in the poem that the ‘good’ ought to be lived up
to. In Beowulf (Part I) none of the good persons fail, at Maldon some do, but it
would have been within their power not to fail. In Beowulf (Part II) those who fail
may from one point of view be blamed, but from another we detect fate as an explanatory
force behind their failure. Fate has changed and the ideal of the ‘good’ is
no longer inspiring. Beowulf reflects a change in morality somewhere between 500
and 800 AD, and it may well be that choosing between a number of early and late
versions of Beowulfs was the easiest and most natural way to create a poem about
the fall of an earlier civilisation.
The poet who wrote Maldon happened to comment upon the same moral problem
as that which mainly concerns the Beowulf tradition. It is likely that the poet and
his audience knew about the Beowulf whom we know today. This gives us a possibility
to infer how the Beowulf poem was actually understood in its day: The retainers
in the second part of the poem are morally speaking wrong. They should have
done better and died with their master or, better still, overcome the dragon. Judging
from Maldon, their behaviour cannot be excused and for the Maldon poet there
was no need to bring in fate in order to explain the shortcomings of chieftains and
retainers. Overweening confidence and guile are sufficient human weaknesses to
explain why men fall short of doing the good.
When we read Beowulf (Part II) , we detect a critical attitude to the moral standard
of the first part that does not correspond with the attitude of the Maldon poet.
This indicates that Beowulf (Part II) is indeed in essence an older poem employed in
a composition designed generally speaking to support the view of the Maldon poet,
namely: if retainers fail, nations die!
Beowulf (Part II) contains a good deal more, but that is a minor problem since
obviously it is part of its tradition. To some extent this tradition may have been tampered
with when the manuscript was produced and the views of anno dazumal
were to be conveyed to an early 11th century audience.
Venantius Fortunatus
Honour, hall, battle, heroism, king and retainer are some of the corner-stones of
Venantius Fortunatus’ poems about the Merovingian duke Lupus, which is why they
are to be discussed here. The four poems form the main core of the analysis, but first
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