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Some difficulties in Beowulf, lines 874–902: Sigemund reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

M. S. Griffith
M. S. Griffith
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford
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Extract

The episode of Beowulf's fight with Grendel is followed almost immediately by brief accounts of two very different heroic careers – those of Sigemund and of Heremod – sung by a minstrel-thegn of Hrothgar, apparently in praise of the hero, as the celebrating Danes race their horses back from Grendel's mere. This narrative sequence invites us to contextualize Beowulf's first great exploit in a broader frame, but the poet does not make explicit the precise nature of the comparisons between these three figures. The critics, however, have broadly agreed that the link with Sigemund compliments Beowulf, whilst the parallel with Heremod contrasts with the hero and with Sigemund. E. G. Stanley comments that the poet ‘perhaps … perceives the hero of his poem at this point as being all that, in descriptions known to him, made Sigemund glorious and all that Heremod was not’. F. C. Robinson agrees that the meaning of this section ‘is never spelled out, but the implication is clear: Beowulf is like Sigemund, unlike Heremod’. The contrast between the ‘sustained heroic exploits’ of Sigemund and the downfall of Heremod is, for R. E. Kaske,. ‘the basic theme of the whole Sigemund-Heremod passage’, and this interpretation is, he thinks, ‘hardly open to question’. The purpose of this article is to re-open the question of the nature of the relationship between Sigemund and Beowulf.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 24 , December 1995 , pp. 11 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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91 The compound, wid-mære, and the collocation, wide mærost, are lexically very similar.

92 King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. Sedgefield, W. J. (Oxford, 1899), p. 124, lines 24–6Google Scholar. For discussion of opinions about the meaning wrecca in the elegies, see E.G. Stanley, ‘Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer’, in his A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature, Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 3 (Toronto, 1987), 234–80, at 234Google Scholar, repr. from Anglia 73 (1956), 413–66.Google Scholar

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96 I am very happy to be able to take the opportunity here warmly to acknowledge the many helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper made by Professor Eric Stanley, Professor Malcolm Godden, Professor Jane Toswell, Ms Louise Pickering and Mr Alan Ward.