The Beowulf Discussion: Section XIV (Long initial commentary)

[Michael]

This discussion was originally posted to the Endor mailing list. It used the Project Gutenberg eText based on Frances Barton Gummere's translation of the poem. The source can be found here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/bwulf11.txt

It is necessary to use a public domain translation, so while more modern translations may be better or preferable, we cannot legally cite their texts here.

Eventually, I switched over to using this source text:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-8.txt

The section numbers differ by 1. I had to post a "null" section for Section XVI to make the transition between translations. Some of my comments address the translator's choices, and they are not relevant to other translations.

XIV
HROTHGAR spake, -- to the hall he went,
stood by the steps, the steep roof saw,
garnished with gold, and Grendel's hand: --
"For the sight I see to the Sovran Ruler
be speedy thanks! A throng of sorrows
I have borne from Grendel; but God still works
wonder on wonder, the Warden-of-Glory.
It was but now that I never more
for woes that weighed on me waited help
long as I lived, when, laved in blood,
stood sword-gore-stained this stateliest house, --
widespread woe for wise men all,
who had no hope to hinder ever
foes infernal and fiendish sprites
from havoc in hall. This hero now,
by the Wielder's might, a work has done
that not all of us erst could ever do
by wile and wisdom. Lo, well can she say
whoso of women this warrior bore
among sons of men, if still she liveth,
that the God of the ages was good to her
in the birth of her bairn. Now, Beowulf, thee,
of heroes best, I shall heartily love
as mine own, my son; preserve thou ever
this kinship new: thou shalt never lack
wealth of the world that I wield as mine!
Full oft for less have I largess showered,
my precious hoard, on a punier man,
less stout in struggle. Thyself hast now
fulfilled such deeds, that thy fame shall endure
through all the ages. As ever he did,
well may the Wielder reward thee still!"
Beowulf spake, bairn of Ecgtheow: --
"This work of war most willingly
we have fought, this fight, and fearlessly dared
force of the foe. Fain, too, were I
hadst thou but seen himself, what time
the fiend in his trappings tottered to fall!
Swiftly, I thought, in strongest gripe
on his bed of death to bind him down,
that he in the hent of this hand of mine
should breathe his last: but he broke away.
Him I might not -- the Maker willed not --
hinder from flight, and firm enough hold
the life-destroyer: too sturdy was he,
the ruthless, in running! For rescue, however,
he left behind him his hand in pledge,
arm and shoulder; nor aught of help
could the cursed one thus procure at all.
None the longer liveth he, loathsome fiend,
sunk in his sins, but sorrow holds him
tightly grasped in gripe of anguish,
in baleful bonds, where bide he must,
evil outlaw, such awful doom
as the Mighty Maker shall mete him out."


More silent seemed the son of Ecglaf {14a}
in boastful speech of his battle-deeds,
since athelings all, through the earl's great prowess,
beheld that hand, on the high roof gazing,
foeman's fingers, -- the forepart of each
of the sturdy nails to steel was likest, --
heathen's "hand-spear," hostile warrior's
claw uncanny. 'Twas clear, they said,
that him no blade of the brave could touch,
how keen soever, or cut away
that battle-hand bloody from baneful foe.


INITIAL COMMENTARY:
I believe this section of the poem was probably one of the most reworked by the Christian poet, since the references to (the Christian) God are several. "Wielder of Wonder" and similar allusions are references to God, according to this Web site that lists words and phrases from the poem that are not generally used today:

http://www.enotes.com/beowulf-text/80250

Also, Athelings were princes. That's an Old English word and I don't believe it was actually used in Danish. The etymology of "atheling" (so far as I have been able to determine -- my favorite online etymological resource has vanished) appears to indicate it is related to the German "adel" (nobility, noble), so an "atheling/aetheling" was a "noble son".

The word could be used of either a prince or nobleman, but eventually became associated with the Anglo-Saxon heirs to the throne of England (Edward the Atheling being the most well-known). In fact, after the Danish invasion of England in the 800s, the word "thegn" became applied to noblemen more often than "atheling".

"Aethel/Athel" survives today in the proper name "Ethel" in the English language.

I don't know what an Old Norse or Dansk word for "prince" would be. "Prince" is derived, through French, from Latin "Princeps" (first, primary, chief, leader). Going back further to the Proto-IndoEuropean root, 'per[1]' (Cf. http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE395.html), gives us Germanic "first" but nothing with a sense of kinship to a leader.

The word "king" is traced back to Proto-IndoEuropean 'gen[e]' (that last letter is supposed to be the schwa or upside-down "e") (Cf. http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE143.html). The root means "to give birth" or "beget", and "king" derives from Old Germanic '*kuningaz', which in turn came from '*kundjaz' meaning "family, race". Related words include "kin", "kind", "kindred". A king was therefore considered the father of his tribe, and they would have been considered his family. The etymology therefore strongly implies an ancient clan-bound tradition gave rise to the Germanic royal families which even Tacitus mentioned in his writings about the Germans.

The son of a king was therefore noble but not necessarily anyone special, which is consistent with Roman writers' claims that Germanic kings often rose up from the ranks. Their only requirement was that they be descended from the right family (the "royal family"). The tradition of kingship passing from father to son became fixed among Germanic peoples (including the Old English, Old Norse, Danes, Franks, and Visigoths) only after permanent land ownership became a fixture in Germanic and Scandinavian societies.

Ancient Germanic peoples did not practice land ownership. Instead, families were expected to change homesteads every year. Their houses were literally burned down. A few archaeological excavations, however, have found indications that by the 1st century CE some Germanic noblemen had established permanent dwellings, especially in what are now the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium -- a region controlled by the Romans and which remained under Roman influence even after the disaster of the Teutoberg Forest, in which the Roman nobleman Varus and three legions were massacred by a confederation of German tribes. Augustus never recovered from the staggering loss of so many trained veteran soldiers, and he supposedly ran through his palace crying out loud, "Varus! Give me back my legions!" The Roman frontier was redrawn in the wake of this disaster.

I venture into all that because Beowulf's society would have been more Scandinavian than Germanic. He was one of the Gotar (Geats, Gauts, Gotar -- ancestors of the southern Swedes). The Gotar were influenced by and actually overshadowed by the Svear, their northern neighbors, whom Tacitus recognized as the most advanced among the Germanic peoples of the 1st century CE.

The Svear (whose capital at Uppsala was marked by rows of grave-mounds similar to those near Edoras in THE LORD OF THE RINGS) appear to have had the earliest dynastic tradition among Germanic peoples. The Scandinavians were virtually indistinguishable from other Germanic peoples up until around the 6th century CE. By that time, the Angles had pretty much relocated to Britain, leaving their old homeland in what is now Denmark to be occupied by former neighbors.

The Norwegians were the most primitive of the Scandinavians and my feeling is that their society became insular and disjointed after the great migrations of the 2nd century BCE. That is, I believe that the East Germans (including the Goths) were largely descended from peoples who left the region of Norway around 250-200 BCE. Archaeology has not fully established this connection, but the relative stability and robust culture enjoyed by the ancient Swedish peoples (the Svear and the Gotar) implies that their neighbors could not match their social and economic development.

Environmental changes in the Baltc Sea limit the numbers of species of fish and other aquatic life there, as compared to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The Svear were based in the Malar valley, which was a warm, fertile heartland capable of supporting sufficient agriculture and animal husbandry to maintain a large population. Peoples further north and west had to rely in large part upon hunting and fishing to augment their farming because their growing season was so short. Farms also had to maintain separate pastures for their cattle.

Essentially, Beowulf was coming from a more advanced, more sophisticated culture that had not been drained of people, power, and innovation. Denmark, on the other hand, had experienced two outbound migrations. The Cimbri and Teutoni are believed to have originated in Denmark, and they left that region around 120 BCE. A few of them supposedly settled in northern Gaul, but most of them migrated south into the Roman lands and were destroyed or enslaved by the Romans (many of the slaves who joined Spartacus' rebellion in 73 BCE were the children or grand-children of the enslaved Cimbri and Teutoni).

The Angles began migrating to Britain in the 5th century CE (probably after 480 CE). By 560 CE, so many Angles had left Denmark that the ancient royal family of Angeln made the move, too. They are believed to have settled in the lands which became Mercia (the Mark or borderland) in western England (Angle-land). Hrothgar was very probably an Angle or a closely related chieftain. Beowulf, his kinsman by marriage, would have been deemed a relative of the Mercian kings.

The social and linguistic connections between the various Germanic and Scandinavian peoples were so strong that from about 300 BCE to about 700 CE it would have been possible for a person to travel from northern Scandinavia to southern Germany, from hte Belgian coast to what is now western Poland, and be able to speak at length with people who lived in similar homes, followed similar customs, and shared similar religious beliefs. The handful of Anglo-Saxon poems that have survived to this day -- "Widsith", "The Wanderer", "Beowulf", and others -- were almost certainly shared and performed in the halls of kings and chieftains across the northern world.

Around 700 CE a phonetic shift began to alter the languages of the Scandinavian peoples. This was also about the time they adopted sails to their long boats, which they had used for centuries. Beowulf's ship, therefore, was not a sailing vessel, but rather was a rowing vessel. The introduction of sails to Scandinavian maritime culture produced a fundamental shift in their technological and economic advancement.

I point that out because I think it's important to understand that the English people who preserved and enjoyed "Beowulf" and related poems that celebrated the deeds of their ancestors in Denmark thought of those heroes as essentially "Englsh" (Anglish), not as Scandinavian. Beowulf was as foreign to the world of the Vikings as would have been King Athelstan of Wessex.

Nonetheless, England would have seemed both a very familiar and a very different place to Beowulf. With all the little kingdoms that rose up in Britain, both Germanic and Celtic, the island became a sort of smaller version of Europe. But as the Old English peoples consolidated their political and cultural strengths, they pushed the Celts farther and farther west and north, and they dissociated themselves somewhat from the Scandinavian peoples.

Denmark stopped that process when the Danes invaded Britain. They settled largely in the lands of the Angles, and the old kingdom of East Anglia vanished into what became known as the Danelaw. Norwegians colonized northern regions of Britain but the Danes left the most profound imprint. And in the 10th century, Danish kings controlled a vast empire that included England, Denmark, and portions of Sweden and Norway. That was the world which bequeathed to us the poetic heritage of Beowulf. This was a world in which Christianity was struggling to overcome paganism. Many of the most active missionaries of the time were in fact Irish monks who were instrumental in Christianizing Continental peoples such as the Saxons.

I think "Beowulf" managed to survive the ravages of time largely because there was a little something in it for everyone: Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Normans. They could all look at the poem and recall an ancestral vision that was both distant and familiar. The poem represents the cultural bond that was shattered by the political struggles and successions of dynasties.

Tolkien surely understood the process of social transformation better than many archaeologists of his generation. As a philologist, he had studied the profound impact upon the English language resulting from the interaction with both Danish and Norman French. And as a philologist, Tolkien could look at the words and at the expressions (the idiom) and see how they had evolved over time, how they had accrued new meanings and lost old meanings.

The political and religious aspects of this particular passage encapsulate so many of those transformations, because Beowulf could not in truth (if he lived) have been a Christian. Nor could Hrothgar or Hygelac nor any of the people mentioned in the poem. They would have sung the praises of Thor, or Odin, or some other "Norse" god or goddess. Frey and Freyja might have been invoked a few times. Njord would have been asked to watch over Beowulf and his men as they rowed their boat to Hrothgar's tribal land.

And Beowulf would not have been an "atheling". He might have been and "adel" or "attel" or something like that. Hrothgar would have been a father to his people, and in saying to Beowulf he would be like a son, Hrothgar was adopting Beowulf into his own tribe. Figuratively, Hrothgar was asserting Danish auhority over Geatish chieftains, and that is indeed what happened historically. But would the original version of the story have stipulated such a relationship between Hrothgar and Beowulf? It's hard to say.

I think one of the clearest Scandinavian influences upon Tolkien's depiction of the Northmen of Middle-earth is his selection of the Goths as a model for one aspect of the Rohirrim. Christopher Tolkien mentions that the early kings of Rhovanion and the Eotheod, from Vidugavia to the final Marh-? were given Anglicized Gothic names. The Gothic language is noted as the first Germanic language to have been written down. Well, that's not entirely accurate. We know that runic inscriptions dating to the 1st century BCE have been found in northern Europe. I'm not sure how far back runic inscriptions had been dated in the 1940s and 1950s, when Tolkien developed the cultural model for the Rohirrim and their Northman relatives. But I think he felt the connections between the various languages were strong enough to justify his linguistic legerdemain. He was pretending that Gothic was the oldest form of the Rohirric language. In fact, Gothic (East German) did branch off from West German and North German dialects early on, but it probably was closer to North Germanic than to West Germanic.

The names of Men and Dwarves from Dale were in fact taken from Old Norse. As with the Goths, the Eotheod migrated away from their ancient homeland and their language slowly changed. The language of Dale would have originally been very close to the language of the Kingdom of Rhovanion, but at some point it would have shifted away from that original tongue -- probably because of its isolation from proto-Rohirric.

Gothic, of course, stopped evolving by the year 711, when the Visigoths were conquered by the Moors. But Old English continued to evolve, so Tolkien naturally used Old English to represent the successor language to early Rohirric. But he was clever about how he depicted the transformation. The first Eotheodic chieftain to be given an Old English name is Frumgar. His son (or grandson) was Fram. These names could actually be Old Norse names, or very close to them. They don't have quite the Mercian feel of the proper names of Eorl and his descendants in Rohan.

While Beorn has been compared to Old English (Anglo-Saxon) warriors, he has also been compared to Viking berserkers. In fact, he looks in many ways like a Norse Viking. He is a large, strong, powerful, frightening man, and the Norwegians proved to be the most fearful of the Vikings (the Swedes, who seem to have served as the model for the Men of Dale and the Long Lake, were more interested in trade and commerce). Norwegian incursions into northern England, Scotland, and Ireland had a profound effect upon English history and culture. The Swedes had a far less impact than the Norwegians.

Hence, Tolkien implies there are closer ties between the Rohirrim and the Beornings and Woodmen of Mirkwood than between either of those groups and the Men of Dale an the Long Lake. The ancient universal kinship expressed in "Beowulf" has been lost by the time we get to the War of the Ring.

Tom Shippey says, in THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH, that except for their use of horses, the Rohirrim appear to be the Anglo-Saxons of poetry. His comparison to those Anglo-Saxons must encompass the larger world of the Anglo-Saxons. It must encompass the Danish and Scandinavian roots of that poetry as well as the increasingly insular culture that we think of as English.

But the Rohirrim are really a blend of all the forces Tolkien felt should be at work in producing the ideal Northmen. They are tall, blond-haired warriors who are feared in battle (like the Vikings). They live in mountain hamlets and towns (like the Norwegians). They have a rich, robust language and poetic tradition (like the Anglo-Saxons), and they are a thoroughly Old English people in the sense that they have an established monarchy. The kings' authority is not dependent upon a council of nobles (Swedish kings were elected by such councils) and the kings did not seize power in bloody coups and feuds (as happened in Denmark and Norway).

Section XIV of "Beowulf" reminds me very much of Tolkien, because he reworked everything Germanic to produce the Northmen, in particular the Rohirrim, just as the last Beowulf poet reworked everything English to produce a "contemporary" English Beowulf who was a Christian Atheling.


ADDENDUM:

I want to add a link here that I posted to the Endor discussion list in my initial commentary for Section XXXIII (which will be reposted here in several weeks). The Web page I'm linking to presents some alternative theories about "Beowulf", including the idea that the Geats were actually located in Denmark, not southern Sweden. I feel it's appropriate to point that out here, since I overlooked it in my original post to Endor (cited above) for this section.

http://www.medievalhistory.net/page004b.htm

[Attalus]

Very interesting Michael. I have always felt that the (one!) version of Beowulf that has survived had been partially rewritten to harmonize with Christian sensibilities.

[Michael]

I suppose the influence of the so-called "Later Beowulf poet" is purely speculative, but I have long been convinced there was at least a second hand involved.

Some people argue that the alleged Christian references are not necessarily so.