Introduction: Fantasy or History?

Summary

Beowulf is the most enigmatic work in English literature. After more than two hundred years of dedicated study by whole libraries of scholars, we still don't know when or where it was written, who wrote it, what kind of person wrote it, what kind of person it was written for (monks? warriors? kings?), and least of all, what was the point of writing it in the first place.

In fact, it is probably the case that there is nothing at all you can say about Beowulf that has not been challenged or denied. If you say, “Beowulf is a poem,” there are immediately voices crying, “No, it is two poems”—or more, the highest bid so far being eleven—“so ineptly joined together that you can still see the stitch-marks!” If you say “Beowulf is in Old English,” the fact is undeniable, but there are immediately voices raised to say, “It is now, but it has to be a translation from some other language”—Old Danish, Old Norse, Old Frisian, the latest contender being Old Gutnish, the language of the Swedish island of Gotland. As for the sentence which begins this Introduction, there has never been any shortage of people who are quite sure they understand the poem perfectly. Only they never agree with each other.

In this cloud of doubt and disagreement, there is nevertheless one opinion held so strongly that it has become an academic article of faith. This is, that Beowulf—to quote the Swedish historian Lars Gahrn—is “completely useless for the student of history.” Beowulf offers a detailed account of early Swedish history, which is consistent with a good deal of early Swedish and Danish legend, but Dr. Gahrn doesn't believe any of it.

He is seconded by Tom Christensen, a Danish archaeologist, who declares that “When historians reject the Lejre legends [of which Beowulf is a part], their judgment must be accepted.” The view becomes authoritative in the fourth revised edition of Friedrich Klaeber's Beowulf, in effect the poem's Authorized Version, where the three modern re-editors state flatly and collectively that “the poem does not offer reliable historical fact.” One of them, writing solo, goes on to insist that “The search for genuine history in the Danish episodes of Beowulf is the search for a chimera.”