Chapter 4 - The Non-National Epic

Summary

The Big Question: Why in England?

Fimbulwinter, crop failure, famine, plague, civil war fought to extinction, continuing vendetta between royal houses, and to cap it all, a dearth of prestige items for the ruling elites, almost as bad as having your mead-settles taken away—as Professors Herschend and Rundkvist have said in their different ways, and as corroborated by Dr. Ljungkvist, it looks very much as if the mid-sixth century was indeed a traumatic period for south and central Scandinavia.

But why should that worry an English writer a couple of centuries later? So much so that he spent a great deal of time and effort integrating many events into his story of a hero and a succession of monsters? He could after all have set his upgraded fairy-tale in England. If he wanted a location for a haunted hall called Heorot—“Hart Hall” or “Stag Hall”—he might well have had one ready to hand. As Professor Harris of Harvard has pointed out, there was a suitable location at Hartlepool, on the northeast coast of England. A very suitable one, indeed, for one of the chilling aspects of the landscape of Heorot in Beowulf is that it is by a lake—Grendel's mother's lair is at the bottom of it—which is so feared that even a hunted animal will turn and die on the shore rather than try to swim across it. Much the same story is still told of the pools near Hartlepool called “Hell Kettles,” said to be bottomless and again, shunned by animals. Not far away, moreover, is Hart Hall itself, said to be haunted by the Hart Hall Hob. There is no obvious need for Beowulf to have a Scandinavian setting at all. So why is it there?

One common answer—implied rather than stated, as is so often the case with theories about the poem—is that it is a response to Viking Age politics in England. There is a moment in Beowulf, just after Wealhtheow has made her doomed attempt to protect the future of her sons, when the poet surveys the Danish hall as the retainers settle themselves for sleep, bringing out their beds and bolsters, and settling their shields and armour and helmets on the benches. He comments approvingly that the Danes were always “ready for war,” whenever their lord had need of them: “that was a good people.”