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The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Marijane Osborn
Marijane Osborn*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 5 , October 1978 , pp. 973 - 981
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Andreas Haarder's view of the poem is representative of that of many scholars:

Beowulf presents a picture of a hall-life that is forever at stake, confronted as it is by the threat of the monster-world.... The hall of Beowulf is the basis of man's existence and the motivation of his actions. The hall is in focus, not the before and after that the Christian preacher will point to.... The monster is man's existential problem which has to be solved again and again. (Beowulf: The Appeal of a Poem [Viborg: Akademisk Forlag, 1975], pp. 239, 241, 279)

Such a description is accurate so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

2 Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), p. 34.

3 Even as Beowulf saves the Danes and the Geats from monsters, secular history, in the form of retribution for feuds, is working against these two nations. But this drama is not “in” the story; it is in the future of the story, implied by the poet or guessed by perceptive characters. Kenneth Sisam casts doubts upon the importance of such historicity in the poem and upon the interpretations that modern historians put upon the passages of foresight, in The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 51–59. For the counterargument that it is thematically important for these two sets of feuds to end tragically see Stanley J. Kahrl, “Feuds in Beowulf: A Tragic Necessity?” Modern Philology, 69 (1972), 189–98.

4 All quotations from Beowulf are from Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Heath, 1950). The translations are my literal renderings and do not represent the style of my forthcoming Beowulf: A Verse-Translation (Los Angeles: Pentangle, 1978).

5 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), p. 185. Bede's story of the conversion of Edwin and his vivid symbol of pagan ignorance were probably as well known in the Beowulf poet's time as in our own, and perhaps the poet was counting on his hearers' having the image of the fleeting sparrow in the backs of their minds, or perhaps he himself was inspired by it in his account of Scyld. But there is an important difference between Scyld's departure and the sparrow's: in Beowulf it is not the horror of not knowing but the mystery that is stressed. The image of Scyld emerging from the unknown and fading back into it at his death is romantic rather than frightening.

6 Charles Donahue, “Beowulf and Christian Tradition: A Reconsideration from a Celtic Stance,” Traditio, 21 (1965), 81.

7 Alain Renoir, “The Heroic Oath in Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Nibelungenlied,” Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Press, 1963), p. 245.

8 Stanley B. Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 158.

9 “Beowulf 99–101,” Notes and Queries, 18 (1971), 163. When I first mentioned the transitional nature of these lines, in Thoth, 10 (1969), 26–27, I did not comment on what now seems the most important point about this transition, mentioned by Ball: “Lines 90–114 of Beowulf thus contain a rapid summary of the main points of Genesis chapters i–iv.”

10 Bede, De Schematibus et Tropis, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: n.p., 1844–65), Vol. xc, cols. 175–86.

11 J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 22 (1936), 20.

12 C. L. Wrenn, ed., Beowulf with the Finnesburg Fragment, rev. ed. (London: Harrap, 1958), p. 188.

13 Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., Beowulf (New York: Farrar, 1968), p. 35.

14 The technique of stopping the story is superficially reminiscent of the Homeric technique discussed by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (trans. Willard R. Trask [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953]) in the chapter “Odysseus' Scar.” But whereas (according to Auerbach) in Homer everything, including digressions, is equally “foregrounded,” in Beowulf the two major digressions about swords introduce additional historical perspectives, scriptural in the passage about the golden hilt and Scandinavian in the one on Wiglafs sword. Both confirm a perspective outside the sphere of awareness of the actors in the story, to whom the larger moral context of the monster fights and the future of their own continuing tribal identity are equally mysterious.

15 The inscription is reproduced by R. I. Page in An Introduction to English Runes (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 170.

16 Klaeber, p. 189. Wrenn assumes that the story of the flood is graphic and runic, in a combination of “Christian and pre-Christian styles which reminds one of the Franks Casket” (p. 56). “It is worth noticing,” he adds, “how the Biblical story has been used in exactly the same way as the Germanic legends proper.” That this is not so is precisely what I am trying to show.

17 Michael D. Cherniss, Ingeld and Christ: Heroic Concepts and Values in Old English Christian Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 149. In The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London: Athlone, 1970), Margaret Goldsmith argues precisely the opposite: “There is a discernible Augustinian pattern of thought throughout Hrothgar's speech” (p. 188).

18 Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1972), p. 311 (viii, 9).

19 The Prose Edda, trans. lean I. Young (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), p. 24.

20 “Religious Attitudes in Beowulf,” in Essays and Poems Presented to Lord David Cecil (London: Constable, 1970), p. 10.

21 Two such divergent experiences are still offered to the audience of the poem today, allowing one scholar to find the “meaning” of Beowulf “already complete within the Germanic heroic ethos” and another to read the poem as “the first great medieval allegory of human life and death based on the beliefs of the Western Church.” The first is G. W. Smithers, quoted by Greenfield, Interpretation, p. 156; the second is Goldsmith, p. viii.

22 City of God, p. 600 (xv, 5). This concept of the archetype may well have been familiar to influential thinkers among the Anglo-Saxons. J. D. A. Ogilvy, in Books Known to the English 597–1066 (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1967), says, “The Civitas Dei was one of the most popular, if not the most popular, of Augustine's works among the English.... The fifteenth book seems to have been especially popular, being used almost as much as all the other books combined” (p. 82).

23 Citing Augustine's City of God, but not this passage, Marie Padgett Hamilton advances much the same interpretation in “The Religious Principle in Beowulf,” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1963): “One is tempted to surmise that the author of Beowulf, in the manner of Bede and Augustine, envisioned the race of Cain in its timeless as well as temporal state ...” (p. 124). When she goes on, however, to ascribe to the poet a deep concern with Augustine's doctrine of Grace, she seems to me to be over-reading the poem.

24 The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, Vol. iii of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936), p. 163 (Maxims I, ll. 192–93).

25 When the dragon burns the gift-throne of the Geats, Beowulf wonders whether this is divine retribution for some crime he has unwittingly committed (ll. 2327–32); curiously, Margaret Goldsmith takes this as a proof of Beowulf s “worldly outlook” (p. 226), which, through a misreading of the text of the poem, she sees as culminating in avarice (p. 239) and ultimately damnation (p. 262 et passim). There is in fact a great difference between Grendel's attack upon Heorot and the dragon's upon the Geats: whereas Grendel cannot approach the gift-throne of Hrothgar, the dragon burns Beowulfs. In heroic terms this is equivalent to the murder of a kingdom, and in such circumstances the dutiful hero-king has little choice: he must avenge the kingdom and obtain an honorable eÐelgyld (my word).

26 See Marijane Osborn, “Classical Meditation and The Wanderer,” Comparison, 1 (1975), 67–101; to be reprinted (condensed) in Studia Mystica, 1 (1978).