BEOWULF. The epic of Beowulf, the most precious relic of Old English, and, indeed, of all early Germanic literature, has come down to us in a single ms., written about A.D. moo, in the Cottonian collection now at the British Museum. The subject of the poem is the exploits of Beowulf, son of Egtheow and nephew of Hygelac, king of the "Geatas," i.e., the people, called in Scandinavian records Gautar, from whom a part of southern Sweden has received its present name Gotland.
The following is a brief outline of the story, which divides itself naturally into five parts.
I. Beowulf, with 14 companions, sails to Denmark, to offer his help to Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall (called "Heorot") has for 12 years been rendered uninhabitable by the ravages of a devouring monster (in human shape) called Grendel, a dweller in the waste, who used nightly to force an entrance and slaughter some of the inmates. Beowulf and his friends are feasted in the long-deserted Heorot. At night the Danes withdraw, leaving the strangers alone. When all but Beowulf are asleep, Grendel enters. One of Beowulf's friends is killed; but Beowulf, unarmed, wrestles with the monster, and tears his arm from the shoulder. Grendel, mortally wounded, escapes from the hall. On the morrow, his bloodstained track is followed until it ends in a distant mere.
2. The Danish kirg and his followers pass the night in Heorot, Beowulf and his comrades being lodged elsewhere. The hall is invaded by Grendel's mother, who kills and carries off one of the Danish nobles. Beowulf proceeds to the mere, and, armed with sword and corslet, plunges into the water. In a vaulted chamber under the waves, he fights with Grendel's mother, and kills her. In the vault he finds the corpse of Grendel; he cuts off the head, and brings it back in triumph.
3. Richly rewarded by Hrothgar, Beowulf returns to his native land and relates to Hygelac the story of his adventures. The king bestows on him lands and honours, and during the reigns of Hygelac and his son Heardred he is the greatest man in the kingdom. When Heardred is killed in battle with the Swedes, Beowulf becomes king.
4. After Beowulf has reigned prosperously for So years, his country is ravaged by a fiery dragon, which inhabits an ancient burial-mound, full of treasure. The royal hall itself is burned to the ground. The aged king, accompanied by II chosen warriors, journeys to the barrow. Bidding his companions retire, he takes up his position near the entrance to the mound. The dragon rushes forth, breathing flames. Beowulf is all but overpowered, and the sight is so terrible that his men, all but Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, seek safety in flight. With Wiglaf's aid, Beowulf slays the dragon, but receives his own death-wound. Wiglaf enters the barrow, and returns to show the dying king the treasures that he has found there. Beowulf names Wiglaf his successor, and ordains that his ashes shall be enshrined in a great mound, placed on a lofty cliff, to be a mark for sailors far out at sea.
5. Amid great lamentation, the hero's body is laid on the funeral pile. The treasures of the dragon's hoard are buried with his ashes; and when the great mound is finished, i 2 of Beowulf's most famous warriors ride around it, celebrating the praises of the bravest, gentlest and most generous of kings.
Many episodes that have nothing to do with Beowulf himself have been inserted with the seeming intention of making the poem into a sort of cyclopaedia of Germanic tradition. They include many particulars of what purports to be the history of the royal houses, not only of the Gautar and the Danes, but also of the Swedes, the continental Angles, the Ostrogoths, the Frisians and the Heathobeards, besides references to matters of unlocalized heroic story such as the exploits of Sigismund. The Saxons are not named, and the Franks appear only as a dreaded hostile power. Of Britain there is no mention; and though there are some dis tinctly Christian passages, they are so incongruous in tone with the rest of the poem that they must be regarded as interpolations. There is a curiously irrelevant prologue, telling the story of Scyld, the founder of the "Scylding" dynasty of Denmark, and the vir tues of his son Beowulf. If this Danish Beowulf had been the hero of the poem, the opening would have been appropriate ; but it seems strangely out of place as an introduction to the story of his namesake. If the mass of traditions which it purports to con tain be genuine, the poem is of unique importance as a source of knowledge respecting the early history of the peoples of northern Germany and Scandinavia.
The starting-point of all Beowulf criticism is the fact (discov ered by N. F. S. Grundtvig in 1815) that one of the episodes of the poem belongs to authentic history. Gregory of Tours, who died in 594, relates that in the reign of Theodoric of Metz (511 534) the Danes invaded the kingdom, and carried off many cap tives and much plunder to their ships. Their king, Chlochilaicus, was attacked and killed by the Franks, who then defeated the Danes in a naval battle, and recovered the booty. The date of these events is ascertained to have been between 512 and 52o. An anonymous history written early in the 8th century (Liber Hist. Francorum, cap. 19) gives the name of the Danish king as Chochilaicus, and says that he was killed in the land of the Attoarii. Now it is related in Beowulf that Hygelac met his death in fighting against the Franks and the Hetware (the Old English form of Attoarii). The primitive Germanic form of the Danish king's name would be Hugilaikaz, which by regular phonetic change became in Old English Hygeldc, and in Old Norse Hugleikr. It is true that the invading king is said in the histories to have been a Dane, whereas the Hygelac of Beowulf belonged to the "Geatas" or Gautar. But a work called Liber Monstrorum, pre served in two mss. of the 1 oth century, cites as an example of extraordinary stature a certain "Huiglaucus, king of the Getae," who was killed by the Franks, and whose bones were preserved on an island at the mouth of the Rhine. It is therefore evident that Hygelac, and his expedition belong to the region of historic fact. This suggests the possibility that the persons mentioned as be longing to the royal houses of the Danes and Swedes had a real existence. Other points of contact between Beowulf and the Scandinavian records confirm the conclusion that the Old English poem contains much of the historical tradition of the Gautar, the Danes and the Swedes.
Of the hero of the poem no mention has been found elsewhere. But the name (the Icelandic form of which is BjOlfr) is genuinely Scandinavian. It was borne by one of the early settlers in Iceland, and a monk named Biuulf is commemorated in the Liber Vitae of the church of Durham. As the historical character of Hygelac has been proved, it is not unreasonable to believe that his nephew Beowulf succeeded Heardred on the throne of the Gautar, and interfered in the dynastic quarrels of the Swedes.
On the other hand the combats with Grendel and his mother and with the fiery dragon belong to the domain of pure mythology. That they have been attributed to Beowulf may not be due solely to the general tendency to connect mythical achievements with the name of any famous hero. The Danish king "Scyld Scefing," whose story is told in the opening lines of the poem, and his son Beowulf, are plainly identical with Sceldwea, son of Sceaf, and his son Beaw, who appear among the ancestors of Woden in the genealogy of the kings of Wessex given in the Anglo-Saxon Chron icle. It is a reasonable conjecture that the tales of victories over Grendel and the fiery dragon belong properly to the myth of Beaw. If Beowulf, the champion of the Gautar, had already be come a theme of epic song, the resemblance of name might easily suggest the idea of enriching his story by adding to it the achieve ments of Beaw.
As the name of Beaw appears in the genealogies of English kings, the traditions of his exploits may have been brought over by the Angles, and there is evidence that the Grendel legend was popularly current in this country. In the schedules of boundaries appended to two Old English charters there occurs mention of pools called "Grendel's mere," one in Wiltshire and the other in Staffordshire. The Wiltshire charter that speaks also of a place called Beowan ham ("Beowa's home"), and another Wiltshire charter has a "Scyld's tree" among the landmarks enumerated. The notion that ancient burial mounds were liable to be inhabited by dragons was common in the Germanic world : there is perhaps a trace of it in the Derbyshire place-name Drakelow, which means "dragon's barrow." The blending of the stories of the mythic Beaw and the his torical Beowulf may have been the work of Scandinavian and not of English poets: Prof. G. Sarrazin has pointed out the striking resemblances between the Scandinavian legend of Bodvarr Biarki and that of the Beowulf of the poem. The English epic, which unquestionably derived its historical elements from Scandinavian song, may be indebted to the same source for its general plan, including the blending of history and myth. But considering the late date of the authority for the Scandinavian traditions, the latter may owe some of their material to English minstrels.
Although the heathen Angles had their own runic alphabet, it is unlikely that any poetry was written down until a generation had grown up trained in the use of the Latin letters learned from Christian missionaries. We cannot determine the date at which some book-learned man, interested in poetry, took down from the lips of a minstrel one of the stories that he had been accustomed to sing. It may have been before loo; much later it can hardly have been, for the old heathen poetry was still in vigorous life. The epic of Beowulf was not the only one that was reduced to writing: a fragment of the song about Finn, king of the Frisians, still survives, and several other heroic poems were possibly writ ten down about the same time. As originally dictated, Beowulf probably contained the story outlined at the beginning of this article, with the addition of one or two of the episodes relating to the hero himself—among them the legend of the swimming-match. The other episodes were introduced by some later writer, who had heard old heathen songs, the substance of which he preserved by weaving it in an abridged form into the texture of the one great poem which he was transcribing. The Christian passages, which are poetically of no value, may be of any date down to that of the extant ms.
An interesting light on the history of the written text seems to be afforded by the phenomena of the existing ms. The poem is divided into numbered sections, the length of which was prob ably determined by the size of the pieces of parchment of which an earlier exemplar consisted. Now the first 52 lines, which are concerned with Scyld and his son Beowulf, stand outside this numbering. It may reasonably be inferred that there once existed a written text of the poem that did not include these lines. Their substance, however, is clearly ancient. Many difficulties will be obviated if we may suppose that this passage is the beginning of a different poem, the hero of which was not Beowulf the son of Egtheow, but his Danish namesake. It is true that Beowulf the Scylding is mentioned at the beginning of the first numbered sec tion; but probably the opening lines of this section have under gone alteration in order to bring them into connection with the prefixed matter.
For the bibliography of the earlier literature on Beowulf, and a detailed exposition of the theories therein advocated, see R. P. Wulker, Grundriss der angelsdchsischen Litteratur (i882). The views of Karl Mullenhoff may be best studied in his Beovulf, Untersuchungen fiber des angelsachsische Epos (1889) . Much valuable matter may be found in B. ten Brink, Beowulf, Untersuchungen (1888) . The work of G. Sarrazin, Beowulf -st udien (1888) , contains, amid much that is fanciful, not a little that deserves careful consideration. The many articles by E. Sievers and S. Bugge, in Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache and Litteratur and other periodicals, are of the utmost importance for the textual criticism and interpretation of the poem. See also R. W. Chambers, Beowulf, an Introduction to the Poem (1921). (H. BR.; X.)