Chapter 3 - Some Unproven Premises

Summary

AFTER A LIFETIME's work on the poem, the leading light of Beowulf research, Frederick Klaeber, took the view that its basic themes were drawn entirely from Scandinavian tradition;

That the themes of the main story, i.e. the contest with the Grendel race and the fight with the dragon, are of direct Scandinavian provenience, may be regarded as practically certain. The same origin is to be assigned to the distinctly historical episodes of the Swedish-Geatish wars of which no other traces can be found in England. (Klaeber 1950, cxiv and cf. cxv)

As these themes provide a good summary of the main storyline of the poem, Klaeber clearly believed that the Old English author had not contributed anything at all to the basic elements of the narrative. The reason no one, to my knowledge, has argued against Klaeber's view, or even commented on it, could of course be that it is a hot potato. But it would seem, rather, that the question has simply gone stone-cold, and Klaeber himself never pursued it any further.

Nearly a dozen of the rulers and princes of the Danes and Swedes who appear in the poem also figure in various Scandinavian sources, and the Geatish king Hygelac turns up in continental sources. Most of these individuals can thus be regarded with reasonable confidence as historical figures of the late fifth and the first half of the sixth century, the end of the Migration Period. In parallel with this, the poem reads almost as a handbook on the material and ideological world of Scandinavia at that time. Beowulf represents a clearly demarcated historical and archaeological framework of considerable credibility.

The question that then has to be asked, but hardly ever is, is this: how did an Old English author get hold of this information about historical, material, and other conditions in Scandinavia?

I will leave aside here the possibility of the pious monk who is usually identified as the author of Beowulf having made a study trip to the pagans of eastern Scandinavia to collect traditional material for his epic. Nor, to my knowledge, has such a highly improbable scenario ever been suggested. And the only option that then remains is to assume that it was in England that the imagined poet learned of Scandinavian oral traditions about events and settings in eastern Scandinavia in the first half of the sixth century.