6 - ealde eðelweardas: Beowulf as a Mirror of Elderly Kings

Summary

‘Remember too that it is no crime to undermine senility, which sags and tumbles to ruin under its own weight. Your father-in-law should be content to have borne office as long as he has. Only a dotard’s power would come your way, and, if you missed it, would fall to someone else. Every attribute of the elderly is next door to decay.’

With these words, Princess Ulvild tried to convince her husband Guthorm to rebel against her father, King Hadding. This legendary king of Denmark had grown old and his power had already started to crumble – overthrowing this aged ruler was justifiable, Ulvild held, on account of his years alone. This anecdote, recorded in Saxo Grammaticus’ twelfth-century Gesta Danorum, is illustrative of the problems that faced early medieval kings once they had reached old age – problems that the poet of Beowulf, as will be shown in this chapter, was well aware of.

Mentioning no fewer than twenty-three different kings, the poet of Beowulf certainly shows a keen interest in kingship. While some of these rulers appear only as part of a royal genealogy, others, such as Scyld Scefing, Heremod and Hygelac, are further developed and function as exempla of good or bad rulership. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Levin Schücking’s suggestion that Beowulf must be read as a Fürstenspiegel, ‘a mirror of princes’, has met with widespread agreement. George Garmonsway, for example, concluded:

Taken as a whole, the story with its episodes and digressions does form a kind of eighth-century Mirror for Magistrates or Book named the Governor, wherein those in authority might have seen pictured their obligations and responsibilities, and from which they could have gleaned political wisdom had they so desired, and learned some useful lessons about current moral sanctions governing behavior in general, and heroic conduct in particular.

In other words, the intended audience for Beowulf may have been a king or a prince who could draw inspiration from the poem.

Schücking further hypothesised that Beowulf was composed for the young son of a ruler, possibly the son of a Danelaw king, for whom the poem was intended as a means to learn the Anglo-Saxon language.