All Things Medieval

Seamus Heaney’s translation is online.

On the Swedish mainland, the Geats (yahts) of this time are ruled by King Hygelac (hee-ye-lahk). His supporting warriors are here called thanes, so the hero is first introduced as “Hygelac’s thane.” His proper name, Beowulf, won’t be introduced until he comes to the door of Hrothgar’s hall. But we learn that Hygelac’s court knows about the monster harassing the Danes, and this young man has decided that the quest has his name on it.

Our hero’s first action in the story is to hire a shipbuilder to make a ship for crossing to Denmark. Old English poetry often uses “kennings,” phrases to stand for an ordinary noun. In this passage, he commands them to build a “wave-crosser” so that he can take the “swan’s road (or riding).” With omens consulted and the ship finished, he takes fourteen men with their gear and sets out, and the ship is said to fly like a bird.

It doesn’t seem to take long to cross to Denmark. They’re on the water for one overnight, and then they sight land. Like England, the Sjaelland Island of Denmark has chalk cliffs facing the sea.

On the cliffs, a guard sees the ship coming. If it were a fleet, that would signal an attack, but just one ship isn’t a great danger. When the ship comes to shore, the men drag the keel up on the narrow beach, and the watchman has ridden his pony down a path to meet them.

We don’t know the watcher’s name, he is just a thane of Hrothgar. On horseback, he shakes his spear to challenge them. He asks them, “Who are you and where have you come from?” He notes that they are in battle-gear and seem noble, but he’s also sure that they are not arriving by invitation. “Now I must know your lineage, lest you go hence/as false spies, travel further/into Danish territory.” (here I’m quoting R. M. Liuzza’s translation, used in my book)

“The eldest one answered him,/leader of the troop, unlocked his word-hoard.” This is a common phrase in Old English poetry. As a “kenning,” it’s a perfect image from their culture, because everyone kept his valuables in a locked wooden chest. A man has words locked up as treasures inside his chest; to speak, he must unlock the word-hoard.

The “eldest one,” “leader of the troop,” now explains that they are thanes of Hygelac of the Geats, and that his own father was Ecgtheow. The name “Ecgtheow” is, like most Old English names, a compound of two words. “Ecg” means “sword blade,” and it’s pronounced like “edge.” “Theow” means “servant.” They have come in friendship to Hrothgar, to help him with the fiend, the hidden evildoer, the corpse-maker.

The dialogue they have with the coast guard seems familiar to fans of the Lord of the Rings, because Beowulf was Tolkien’s model when he composed the dialogue between Aragorn and any of the Rohirrim who are meeting him. The guard answers Beowulf by stating a proverb that a good warrior must judge both words and deeds. Because they are stating a friendly intent, his men will guard their ship while he guides them to Hrothar’s hall.

The poem has been broken into parts counted in Roman numerals. Part I was about Scyld Sceafing, to set the stage. Part II introduces Hrothgar and Heorot, the grand mead hall he has built. We hear of Grendel, a monster descended from Cain, who hates the joy and fellowship of the hall. Part III begins the action. Link to antiquated but free version: here.

“When the sun was sunken, he set out to visit/The lofty hall-building, how the Ring-Danes had used it/For beds and benches when the banquet was over./Then he found there reposing many a noble /Asleep after supper; sorrow the heroes,/Misery knew not. The monster of evil/Greedy and cruel tarried but little,/He drags off thirty of them, and devours them/Fell and frantic, and forced from their slumbers/Thirty of thanemen; thence he departed/Leaping and laughing, his lair to return to,/With surfeit of slaughter sallying homeward.”

So many questions come to my mind, but the poem doesn’t answer them. How could he take thirty men without some of them waking up and fighting back? Or at least running away? How was this only discovered when the sun rose? Didn’t any of the men scream? The whole thing seems to play out silently, and yet later we read that his killing method (at least sometimes) meant sucking the blood out right there in the hall. He didn’t smother each one silently, then gather them all up to sneak out.

The next night, we read, he came back again. And after that, men were afraid to sleep in the hall, so they tried outbuildings. He picked them off one by one, easily. He can’t surely have taken 30 at once every night, unless Heorot had at least the population of Copenhagen, if not Shanghai. Because this went on for twelve years, or twelve winters. Was Heorot only their home in winter because the men spent time away in the summer? Maybe, but that wouldn’t help the race to survive if Grendel was wiling to eat women and children, which surely he was.

The Danes seem to have been helpless. Again, the modern mind boggles: couldn’t you build something, invent something? Couldn’t the men of the shield wall develop a way to defend? Did they really just go to sleep every night and wait? The poem doesn’t give more details, except that the Christian poet writing in Old English must remind us that this is history (or at least historical fiction) and happened before conversion:

“At the shrines of their idols often they promised/Gifts and offerings, earnestly prayed they/The devil from hell would help them to lighten/Their people’s oppression. Such practice they used then,/Hope of the heathen; hell they remembered/In innermost spirit, God they knew not,The true God they do not know./Judge of their actions, All-wielding Ruler,/No praise could they give the Guardian of Heaven,/The Wielder of Glory.”

There are three monsters in the Beowulf poem, but the only one with a name is Grendel. There is almost no description of Grendel in the story. We can surmise that he’s small enough to fit through the hall doorway, but big enough to pick up men easily. He seems to have a humanoid figure, such that his arm can be torn off, and his footprints can be followed. He has teeth and claws, and he can see and hear. That’s about all we’ve got.

Artists have made guesses at what Grendel may have looked like. I’m fond of the work of Gareth Hinds, who made a three-volume graphic novel for Beowulf. I used one of his images for the cover of my paperback.

Following our cultural stereotype of associating the color black with evil, contemporary American artists usually follow Hinds in making him tar-colored. John Gardner’s 1970 novel about Grendel used cover art not far from Hinds’ image.

The 2005 movie, “Beowulf and Grendel,” pushed the monster in a more humanoid direction.

Other artists have pushed his form in a more animal-like direction with fur or more reptilian with a lizard head. Others have given him bull’s horns as demons are often represented (perhaps based on ancient pagan gods with horns?).

If I were an artist and I wanted to draw Grendel, I think I would start by making him swampy, because it turns out that he and his mother live in a swamp. So he should be wet-looking with algae, but I’d also give him fur, probably ordinary brown or black fur like a bear. I would make him larger than he’s usually represented, at least twice the height of a man, maybe a bit more. The door at the King’s hall could have been twice the height of a man, just to be impressive, in which case Grendel could be even larger but able to stoop through.

Grendel has a mother, but he doesn’t live in any sort of colony or family. If he did, that would be a factor in his favor, for the worst creatures live and fight alone. We’ll get to his mother in time, but there’s even less description of her. The way monsters operated, she might not even look like him. In Norse mythology, anything might give birth to anything else.

The biggest obstacle to modern readers understanding the story of Beowulf seems to be the story’s attitude, and our attitude, toward monsters. What are monsters? Do they exist? Why are they monsters? What is their motivation to attack us? Are they irredeemably evil?

The modern answers to these questions: No, they do not exist; there are only animals and humans. They are “monsters” because we view them that way, we force them into that role for reasons of our own. Their motivations to attack are either animal (survival) or human (some kind of pain-based revenge or protection). They aren’t irredeemably evil, because that would imply that we are so, ourselves, at least some of us. In some extreme circumstance, the evil one can choose good.

The pre-modern answers: Yes, they do exist, and they are either the product of an unnatural coupling among animal, human and spirit, or they have some other unique, other-worldly origin. They are monsters because they just are, the way carnivores are carnivores, the way sea creatures breathe water. Their motivation to attack us is that it’s their nature to do so, because they really are irredeemably evil.

The only way to understand Beowulf’s story is to step into the ancient world and accept that monsters are monsters. They don’t have an understandable reason for being bad. They’re just bad. They may envy humans for being redeemable, but their response is to kill, not to try to reform.

Monsters came with the ancestral legends of the North Germanic tribes. In their mythology, there were gods and giants, with the giants representing destructive forces. Monsters were the offspring of giants, or perhaps of Loki, the one god whose alliance to good was questionable.

But newly-Christianized Anglo-Saxons had to find another way of thinking about monsters. The Bible pointed them back to the first wicked man, Cain, who did the worst thing the Germanic tribesmen could imagine: he killed his brother. Kin-slaying happened, but it was always a shock and often meant expelling the guilty party. So Cain was fingered as the progenitor of monsters. His lineage must have deliberately interbred with demons and monstrous animals.

But there’s one obvious problem with Cain as the progenitor of monsters: the Flood killed all humans except the family of Noah, who was not descended from Cain. One theory was that wicked men and monsters wrote down evil spells on granite, and after the flood they were discovered and evil revived.

So it really all goes back to Cain. And think about Cain’s story in the Bible: having killed his brother, he was made an outcast. To the Germanic tribes, being an outcast was the worst punishment. An “outlaw” meant someone deemed outside the protection of kinship law, someone who could be murdered without repercussions. An outlaw was afraid all the time, not sure who he could trust. An outlaw could try to settle somewhere and have a family, but his children would not be part of a kinship system, so they too would be outlaws. That’s one rational reason for monsters to hate humans: because humans have the joy of kinship. But while it may be understandable, it’s still evil to the core. There was no redeeming feature in any monster, in the Anglo-Saxon or Danish mind.

The prefatory remarks about Scyld Sceafing and his dynasty are meant to lead us to Hrothgar, the King at Heorot. He is one of a set of brothers, but their deeds are not given to us in the story. His name isn’t listed first, so the implication is that he isn’t the oldest, but it was very common for young men to die in battle. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex in the late 800s, was the youngest son with four brothers ahead of him, but in the end he ruled longest and became greatest.

So it was with Hrothgar, for as he became great, he urged his men to build him the largest and finest hall of all the kings in the region. In this story, he is identified with his hall, for the building of the hall is what brings calamity on his head. But from the legends of other Germanic tribes, and from later details in the story, we know a few other things about him.

At the time of this story, he is apparently no longer strong: either elderly or suffering from a disease. He seems to have married late in life, for he is presented as having only sons who are not yet of age. There are two legendary feuds connected to Hrothgar’s family.

First, it seems that when Hrothgar’s older brother died, he left a son. This son, Hrothulf, must have been too young to rule, so the council chose Hrothgar. But during Hrothgar’s reign, Hrothulf has been growing up as the heir presumptive. There was no direct rule of primogeniture at this point among the Danes, Swedes, and Anglo-Saxons. As the council had chosen Hrothgar, so after his death they might choose the nephew Hrothulf instead of the children Hrethric or Hrothmund. Connected legends of Hrolf Kraki, who seems to be the same person as Hrothulf, suggest that he did become king. What happened to the little boys? It’s unclear, but probably at least one of them was murdered, while the other may have escaped.

Second, Hrothgar has a daughter named Freawaru, and in the story, it will be mentioned that she is going to be married soon. She will be a “peace-weaver” bride, sent to the Heathobards to end hostilities with Ingeld, their prince. But we know from another fragment of a legend that the feud did not end, with disastrous results. There are hints that the Heathobards will eventually attack Heorot and burn it down.

At this early point in the story, the focus is on Heorot, the grand hall that Hrothgar has just built. The story tells us that it was very large and very fine, but it gives us only one concrete visual detail. It was called Heorot (“hart”) because it had horned antlers at the ends of the roofline.

The site that archeologists can identify is Lejre, not far from Copenhagen. At Lejre, they found the outline of a very large hall, which the Danish government has reconstructed as part of Sagnlandet (Land of Legends) living museum. The King’s Hall is 61 meters (200 feet) long and 10 meters (30 feet) high. If you haven’t already seen the documentary about building it, I hope you will give it fifteen minutes.

These halls had an unusual feature: their walls and roofline were curved, like a ship. We have some architects and engineers in the audience, so perhaps some of them would like to comment on the benefits of this design. Inside, rafters and pairs of wooden pillars supported the roof. The hall at Lejre has small windows along the wall, and additionally, we know that the hall design always featured shuttered windows at the front and back roof peak, above the doors. These high windows allowed smoke to exit; there may also have been other smoke holes along the roofline.

Inside, it was mostly just one open room. At the end where the king sat, there was probably a dividing wall that sheltered his private room, where treasure was kept in chests. More chests lined the walls, and we see in the story that among other things, they held blankets and pillows to turn the hall into a dormitory at night. These public chests did not have treasure, but many of the men sleeping in the hall had gold and silver arm rings. Turning the hall into a dormitory was one way of keeping it under guard at all times.

The genealogy presented in the opening passages of Beowulf presents us with five generations of the Scylding dynasty. It’s a simplified family tree that leaves out some names found in other Germanic sources. It even leaves out a name that will later come up in the Beowulf story. But to start off with confusion, Scyld Sceafing’s son is presented as “Beowulf.” It’s no wonder that early readers thought this was introducing Our Hero.

Scholars have suggested that Scyld’s son may have been called simply Beow, which meant “barley,” but was misspelled. It doesn’t really matter for casual readers. The next son is called Half-Dane, and his sons are Heorogar, Hrothgar, and Halga the Good. There’s a suggestion that a sister married Onela, the King of Swedes.

We aren’t familiar with these people, but it seems that the contemporary audience was. Scholars have pointed to parallels with other stories, such that Hrothgar is the same as Norse Hroarr and Old Danish Ro. His nephew Hrothulf, who has no active role in our story, is the main character Hrolfr Kraki in an Icelandic saga. Half-Dane is Haldan in some sagas, and his daughter’s name is Signy in some stories, and Yrsa in others.

It’s too difficult to keep track of all of these interlocked story variations if you aren’t a scholar of Germanic literature. But it’s good to keep in mind that Beowulf’s author used this shared background to build out the world of the story. There are figures standing in the shadows, mentioned here and there. In way, we can think of Beowulf as fan fiction that’s set in the world of the sagas.

“Listen!” The poem begins not with the main storyline about Beowulf fighting monsters, but with the establishment of the Danish dynasty whose great hall will be host to those stories. Modern stories begin in the middle of the main action: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” “Call me Ishmael.”

Here, though, we start with the great-grandfather of the aging king whose court is under attack by a monster. The poet who chanted such a story to the men in the hall knew that while he did need to hook their attention, he didn’t need to connect that hook to the main story. The ship burial of Scyld Sceafing would get their attention, and it would carry them into the legendary heroic past.

Scyld, we learn, had arrived on the Danish shores in a boat, of unknown parentage. In other versions of the legend, the child in the boat was called Sceaf, after the sheaf of grain that was within. An Old English poem called Widsith refers to Sceaf as the King of the Lombards, which suggests that the legendary roots are back in the pre-Migration times when tribes that later became distant (the Lombards settled in the Alpine foothills) were immediate and local in the North.

Scyld rose to become a great Danish war-leader who enriched his people; they were probably raiding the towns of the Franks, to the south, where Roman skills and wealth persisted. When Scyld died, he was buried in a very unusual way: his ship was set adrift, returning him to the sea.

Ship burials were not usually done that way. Instead, what archeologists have discovered in Migration-Age royal tombs is that the ship itself was buried. We think of this type of ship as a “Viking ship” because the construction methods were the same 500 years later: “clinker” or “lapstrake” building in which the long boards overlap each other, rising from the keel to shape the ship’s body. The royal tomb at Sutton Hoo held such a ship, with a mound covering it.

But Scyld Sceafing’s ship was set adrift after it was loaded with the king’s body and a great deal of armor, weapons, and other treasures. The passage ends by saying, “Men do not know who received that cargo.” Did it sink in the North Sea, or did it drift up the coast of Norway to sink in a fjord? The story of this rare burial must have been interesting enough on its own to get the story started.

image: Sutton Hoo ship being unearthed

The sole copy of Beowulf is in the British Museum, as it has been since it was donated in the 18th century, and its origin is clearly in an English monastery. But the story makes no reference at all to any places in England, nor to any Anglo-Saxon kings. It is rooted entirely in the North Atlantic and Baltic coastal lands and islands.

The Germanic tribes came into written history by emerging from the north and coming down as far as Italy, Spain, and North Africa. When the migrations settled, many tribes still lived in the North. The major groups were Swedes, Danes, Saxons, and Franks, but there were many smaller tribal and national groups.

The map here has all of the peoples and places that the poem references. The Danes are on modern Denmark’s islands, but the main peninsula belongs to the Jutes and Angles. By legend, the Jutes, Angles and North Saxons settled across the water in Celtic Britain, while other Jutes and Saxons stayed behind to populate Denmark and Germany.

Tracing the identity of the Geats is not simple, partly because they don’t have a modern legacy beyond memory in place names. Western Sweden’s Göteborg and Götaland mark where the tribe once lived. Additionally, there are three very similar Germanic tribal names that may or may not be ethnically connected: the Jutes, the Gutes, and the Goths. The Goths moved south to conquer Rome, and the Gutes are marked on some maps a bit to the north of the Geats, in Sweden. Were the Geats and Jutes the same people, or were they as distinct from each other as were the Swedes and the Franks?

For modern English speakers, the name “Geat” is problematic. It sounds a bit like some ethnic slurs used in the recent past, so it feels faintly inappropriate. Does it rhyme with “feet,” the way Wackerbarth interpreted it? Short answer: no. The best approximation with a modern word is “yacht.” In Old English, a G followed by an e, i or y became a fricative that softened even more into a Y. The diphthong “ea” didn’t correspond to any of the modern readings (as in “sea” or “bear”). The letter “a” still and always meant “ah.” It was modified by the “e” only in starting with an “ey” or “ay” sound. It’s just not far off to read it as “ya.”

The letter “g” always has this flexible profile in Germanic languages. It might be a hard G as in “go;” that sound was most often retained in the northernmost tongues. It might become a sort of “gghh” fricative in middle position, and around low vowels like “o,” this could turn into “w.” When “g” it was near an “ee” sound, it might go over to “y.”

In modern English, we have accepted all of these outcomes in various words native to Old English or borrowed from Norse or German. So we see that “day” begins with “dawn,” and if you’ve learned German “Guten Tag,” you can see that the original word was “dag” (actually Proto-Germanic “dages”). Etymonline.com gives us this comparison list: Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Dutch dag, Old Frisian di, dei, Old High German tag, German Tag, Old Norse dagr, Gothic dags.

In the same way, Old English “wain” and “wayne,” a four-wheeled cart, joined Norse “wagon,” sometimes spelled “waggon” to make sure the G stayed in place. Old English “fæger“ (Old Saxon fagar, Old Norse fagr, Swedish fager, Old High German fagar), meaning “beautiful,” saw its “g” soften to “y” when surrounded by “æ” and “e” and in modern English is noted only by the remaining “i” in “fair.” Old English “sagu,” a knife, gave us “saw” by pulling the “g” in the other direction, to “w.”

We all cope with the unpredictability of initial “g” in words like get, where it’s hard, and gel, where it’s soft. What about a name like Gilly, which appears in the Game of Thrones books? Is it hard, like a fish’s gills or a craft guild, or is it soft, like Jill or jelly? There’s really no strict answer, it could be either way.

If you can remember to read “Geat” as “Yacht,” you’re doing very well. If you forget, you’re no worse than Professor Wackerbarth.

Beowulf as a literary work was created some time between 700 and 1000 AD. That’s like knowing that Moby Dick was written some time between 1700 and 2000. True enough, but to us, there’s really a huge difference between 1750 and 1999. There is a lot of scholarly disagreement about when it should be placed, disagreement that I find fascinating but you may not, so I’ll pass it by for now.

Beowulf as a story is easier to place. While the hero seems to be a fictional character, others are either historical or semi-historical. They correspond to characters in Norse and Germanic legends that are set in the late Migration/early Vendel times. This is the period between Roman rule, when the Germanic tribes first came out of the north into central Europe, and the Viking period. It’s roughly between 300 and 600. Obviously, the earlier the king, the more legendary. King Hrothgar, an actual character in the story? Probably roughly 500. His ancestor Scyld Sceafing? If he lived, maybe he goes back to Roman times.

In this period, the Germanic people used both copper alloys and iron. They were writing with the Elder Futhark, a runic alphabet we mostly see on jewelry. By the Viking Age, that runic system was out of use. They were pre-Christian, of course. We vaguely know their gods names as preserved in our English weekday names, but we’ve lost most knowledge of their beliefs. Tacitus hinted at an earth religion that was probably nothing like our Marvel Superhero ideas of Thor and Odin. In Danish bogs, they find mummified bodies that were strangled, and these could have been sacrificed to these older gods we’ve forgotten. Marvel and DC are both staying far away from those gods.

There’s something quite important about these Germanic tribes, though. Tacitus tell us:

They choose their kings by birth, their generals for merit. These kings have not unlimited or arbitrary power, and the generals do more by example than by authority. If they are energetic, if they are conspicuous, if they fight in the front, they lead because they are admired. But to reprimand, to imprison, even to flog, is permitted to the priests alone, and that not as a punishment, or at the general’s bidding, but, as it were, by the mandate of the god whom they believe to inspire the warrior.

Instead, Tacitus says, the king’s power lay mainly in being able to persuade others. There was a council of chiefs, and sometimes there too an assembly of the whole tribe.

Tacitus is describing what the Romans saw around 70 AD, when the migration into Europe had just begun. But about 1000 years later, on the eve of the Norman Conquest, the English were still relying on a chiefs’ council called the Witan to choose their king and make the decisions. Perhaps we can view English political history as the story of how Norman autocracy was suddenly imposed 1066 and the Witan went into hiding, but slowly it re-emerged in the Magna Carta. When the Parliament chose the king in 1688, the counter-revolution was complete. We have had the English notion of government limited by the people ever since.

But the king did matter as a leader. Tacitus tells us that,

It is no shame to be seen among a chief’s followers. Even in his escort there are gradations of rank, dependent on the choice of the man to whom they are attached. These followers vie keenly with each others as to who shall rank first with his chiefs, the chiefs as to who shall have the most numerous and the bravest followers. It is an honor as well as a source of strength to be thus always surrounded by a large body of picked youths; it is an ornament in peace and a defense in war.

Tacitus explains that the Germans he saw disdained farming as much as possible and built their halls out of timber. Instead of forming towns and cities, they created settlements with the Great Hall at the center of a large clearing. Young men of fighting age lived at the Great Hall, but settled men in families lived a few miles away in their own settlements. Tacitus was most of all impressed with the German women, who were virtuous beyond Roman standards. They married late by Roman standards and cared for their own babies.

The world of Beowulf isn’t much different from what Tacitus depicts, although at least 400 years had passed.