Heroes and Monsters

Heroes and Monsters:

After an encouragement posted here some time ago, I decided to find a copy of Beowulf for reading. The first copy I found was an audio-book at a local library, a recent edition translated and read by Seamus Heaney. More recently, I have been able to find a text version of the same translation, with the Anglo-Saxon text set out alongside the translation.

There's a lot that could be said; I'll simply say that I loved it.

The story-telling sometimes rushes, sometimes wanders, and sometimes takes unexpected side-turnings. But when it is read aloud by a competent poet and story-teller like Heaney, it comes alive in the listener's mind. As the story draws towards its ending, the listener is filled with awe at the life and death of Beowulf.

One of the interesting parts of the story is contained in who and what Beowulf fights. He is a powerful wrestler, very capable with spear and sword, and must have fought fellow-men many times in the wars between the Geats, Frisians, Danes, and Swedes. But the poem doesn't mention these fights. All of the important feats of Beowulf that are mentioned are struggles against monstrous evil.

This makes Beowulf's deeds stand out in sharp relief; he is a mighty warrior against the demonic evil of Grendel, the hideous strength of Grendel's mother, and the fiery danger of a dragon. These examples of courage allow Beowulf to become more than an example of a particularly good warrior for his tribe. They make him into an example for a much wider audience.

I suspect this is why the story survived in the form it did, and why it is still capable of enthralling readers and listeners.

A surprising aside along the way: I have learned that Beowulf was a curiousity for historians and scholars of the Anglo-Saxon language for several centuries after its re-discovery. In the 1930's, a watershed lecture by scholar J.R.R. Tolkien changed this radically, by insisting that Beowulf was important first as a work of art. Some say that the old Anglo-Saxon poem would not be read widely today if Tolkien had not delivered that lecture.

At minimum, I suspect that there are echoes of Beowulf in the works of Tolkien. Which should make re-reading Tolkien's works much more interesting.