My first reading of Beowulf occurred when I was a precocious teenager. I saw the ancient classic with its strange words and high language and figured I’d give it a go. I read the words, surely, but I didn’t really retain much other than that there was a monster named Grendel and a dragon horde at the end. Beowulf killed them all, day saved.
A decade or so later I was in college working towards my bachelors in English with and emphasis in creative writing. There were so many bog standard classes I could take on modern or post-modern literature. Did I really need a semester studying the crucible? Was I really going to waste my time on American Lit like “The Great Gatsby” and “Catcher in the Rye” which I already read in high school and hated for their vapid pointless messaging? And besides, the people who love “Catcher” because Caulfield is such a “rebel, a middle finger to the establishment and yeah, I want to be a nihilist like him” clearly never read the last fifty pages where he has his epiphany at the carousel.
I flipped through the courses and saw a class offered in Early Middle English Literature. It was going to be a challenge because, yes, we were going to work through selections of “The Canterbury Tales” in the original Middle English…but that was nerdy obscure enough that I was up for it.
It was there that I discovered a startling fact; Beowulf comes to us from only one source called the Nowell Codex. It was nearly destroyed by a fire in the early 1700s long before it had ever been copied again. This is a world treasure on par with the Illiad and the Bible and each of those have many copies that survived to give modern translators a complete picture. Beowulf was one story in one volume, in two hands of writing (some of it illegible) that survives today and holds a nigh on mandatory reading status for most liberal educations, including the Harvard 5-Foot Bookshelf which I continue making my way through. (St. Augustine’s “Confessions” is next on the list for the curious…that is if my 600 page “The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 1” doesn’t get in the way…that and “Princess of Mars” my Edgar Rice Burroughs…don’t hold your breath.)
It was very normal during my college years for teachers and students to look at the epic poem and all things through a modern lens. Personally, unless you are jumping from lens to lens, I hate these ideological “lenses”. It’s basically a device one uses to make a text tell you what you want it to say rather than absorbing it naturally and actually listening to what it says. I remember this one class I had where a teacher told us that absolutely every detail in a short story had to mean something. She was obsessed with this one tale with a guy who wore a blue Hawaiian shirt with blue macaws all over it. The teacher had spend literal decades trying to discern the shirts meaning. As a writer I can tell you…we include stuff for no hidden meaning reason whatsoever. In fact writers include some things just to set analysts running in circles after their own tail. They think the writer is a genius high above them…and we’re just messing with them.
This modern lens, however, cast Beowulf as a toxic masculine, alpha, patriarchal oppressor type of hero. He was out for personal glory at any cost, and was going to screw any woman along the way. This was also the way the 2007 film casts the hero. At the time I was very impressed with the film and thought it did the character great justice.
I watched Michael Crichton’s film 1999 film “The 13th Warrior” a few years later and found that I liked that Beowulf far better. He was a noble man called upon to face a terrible evil no-one else could nor would. He gathered twelve with him and they faced it down together. I still quite like that telling, though the film is really hard to find. The death scene of Beowulf is still one of my top five moments in cinema. Its silence and subtle symbology is so very worthy of praise.
So, a month ago I began the long trek through this relatively short manuscript, and I was shocked to discover the difference that fifteen years can make.
In the intervening time between that college course and this reading, I had become a father and specifically a father to a boy who is now twelve-years-old and seeking guidance on what it means to become a man. What masculinity supposed to be, he has been asking, and especially Christian Masculinity? Naturally I have been showing him movies like “Gladiator”, “The 13th Warrior”, “Kingdom of Heaven”, “Master and Commander” and others to show him what a man is, a good man, a proper man, and then have discussions about it afterwards. I can’t do that with the 2007 “Beowulf”…and especially because that movie is the direct opposite of who Beowulf actually is.
With older, hopefully wiser, eyes I saw the tale unfold before me and saw Beowulf not as a symbol of toxic masculinity but as a positive hero that all men should aim to be like.
First of all, I must before anything else address this claim that Beowulf is a braggart only out for glory. Is he out for glory? Yes. He absolutely is. It is not, however, the only reason he seeks in doing his great feats.
There is an exchange with Unferth, the nephew to Hrothgar whose mead hall is plagued by the monster known as Grendel, where Unferth gets sassy with Beowulf to call his honor into account. Unferth asks if he is the same Beowulf who swam against Breca for seven days and nights across the open ocean in a race. The moment I realized I was reading this story differently was when Beowulf tells him, no, it wasn’t seven days and nights. It was only five.
Now, a braggart would have stretched the story farther. He who wants only glory and will do anything to get it will make a tall tale even taler. One could say that when Beowulf reveals to all that they both swam in full armor and each wielding a sword, you might be ablate say he is stretching the truth. There then is the fact that Beowulf does the same feat, swimming in full armor with a sword, in going after Grendel’s mother.
Beowulf does want glory, but the fact is that he isn’t willing to sacrifice anything other than himself to get it. He wants glory defending his step-brother king, Hygelac, in battle. He seeks glory by testing himself against Breca on an open ocean infested with water demons. Beowulf seeks glory by defending those who cannot defend themselves against terrible monsters. Even though he brings along companions who are heroes in their own right, he takes the big risks.
When he faced down Grendel he did it without sword and without armor; face to face strength against strength. Interestingly there was a spell Grendel put on himself to make iron armor and weapons completely useless against them. While others put their faith in weapons and armor to even the odds in the fight with a monstrous, misshapen, giant, Beowulf did without them to test himself. He stumbled upon the only way to beat the monster by going back to ancient tradition.
After Grendel was felled, Beowulf forbid his companions to follow him into her lair. He took an ancient magical sword, suited up in armor, and dove into the ocean alone. The magic sword failed him, the armor only bought him more time, and in the end he slaughtered the evil creature with a sword forged by pre-flood giants that no man should have been able to lift. The things of men failed him in his quest again. His companions began to walk away to mourn Beowulf, until he appeared with the head and the hilt of the giant’s sword that melted in Grendel’s mother’s blood.
When in his nineties King Beowulf gathers a new batch of eleven warrior heroes to defeat a dragon who is attacking the people of his kingdom, he makes them swear to only intervene if it kills him. If he can defeat it alone he wants the glory. If not then his companions have a duty to protect the people with their lives.
This is not a toxic male, glory hound perspective. Against each monster, Beowulf’s primary reason for doing any of it is to protect those who are weak than the creature. The glory is secondary and he refuses to even put his companions in the way for his glory. He tests himself, is willing to sacrifice himself, but not willing to sacrifice others. In his telling of each story he is factual, and only praises himself accurately nearly downplaying it with is sober assessment.
There is a charge that Beowulf was doing it all for the money on top of the glory, which proves that those who make the charge haven’t read the text. We modern people think of gold and ancient storied treasures as markers of wealth to be sought and held onto. In the “viking” society, Gold was seen as something to give away. The best of kings gave generously to those around them, calling them “ring giver” or “ring breaker”.
Yes, Hrothgar promises Beowulf gold and riches if he succeeds in killing Grendel and then more costly gems and ancient weapons and vessels of gold to kill his mother. The hero returns home with tons and tons of riches. And what does he do? He gives it all to his king, Hygelac. He saves not a coin of it for himself.
A crucial moment in the epic is when Hrothgar, after the death of the monster and its mother, tells Beowulf specifically to not hard gold for himself, and to not sit in self-glory. He tells the tale of a King who did so and a great evil and curse came upon him and his people. Hrothgar advises Beowulf to look to his subjects, when the great man inevitably becomes king, and take car of them and be generous with them as a shepherd or a good father. We can see that Beowulf is already on this trajectory and may not have needed the pep talk before he went home and gave all away and committed himself again to service under another who was not nearly his equal in strength, popularity, or deed.
Socrates once asked a question, “Can virtue be taught?”. I don’t mind telling you that this question messed me up for about twelve hours. We like to believe that it can be taught, that we can force people to do the right thing whether they want to or not. It is my belief that we can only feed an existing affection for virtue, and Hrothgar does exactly this. If Beowulf’s kingship is any indication, he listened deeply and embraced his affection for those kingly virtues.
My final point for Beowulf, because this is already long and I could write an extensive thesis paper on it and who would want to read that, is in regards to how the text describes God.
Now, there is a lot of criticism about the text because it seems that someone who copied it along the way was a Christian and hated the pagan overtones and so altered it to fit their world view. Fine. Even Grendel and his mother are referred to as creatures that survived the biblical flood. They are supposedly children of the nephilim, that race of evil giants and abominations that occurred as a result of the union between angels (fallen?) and mortal women that God was trying to wipe out with the flood. Each king and warrior praises the Christian God in one way or another and it bothers some people. I admit, it is pretty jarring for a Christian such as myself as well. However, there is one idea within the story that resonates with me very deeply on a Christian level, and especially as a Christian Man.
A number of times throughout the story, God is referred to as the “Wielder of Heroes”. The idea is that every one who becomes a hero, that is the right person for the right job at the right time, is a sword, or a hammer, or a tool of some kind in the hand of God. God picks up the “weapon” as a man wields a sword with singular purpose and intent. The glory is truly God’s and not man’s. Any man can become a hero, but all heroes are men taken as a tool into the hands of God.
Part of the implication is that every man should keep himself keen/sharp like a sword so that when God does wield him, he is ready for the purpose for which he has been forged. How do we do this? By keeping ourselves spiritually, mentally, and physically prepared in as much as we can be. He will use us in whatever state He finds us, however it will go far easier on each us if we are as ready and healthy as we can be in those three areas.
I have a hundred other things I could bring up, but as an older man than I was at my first and second reading…and as a father now looking to train my son in what it means to be a man this is what I find to be most critical.
Oh, and the idea that Beowulf was a womanizer has zero basis in the story. It barely mentions that at some time during his reign he even had a queen who mourned his death. So…poo on that nonsense.
😉
Finding Narnia 
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