Mære Mearcstapa

Beowulf Challenge, Week Two

Photo by Mariusz Słoński on Unsplash

Dear reader,

Thanks for joining along with our Beowulf Challenge. This week, we are discussing roughly the first third of the poem. Obviously, there is much more here than we can cover in one post, but I will address a number of themes and ideas, and if I leave anything out that interests you, please bring it up in the comments. In addition to the general discussion, there is a close reading of a passage, which includes a clip of my reading of a few lines of the Old English aloud. At the end of the post, I also include some discussion questions to consider as you read the next installment, as well as links to some readings and performances of the poem, and a documentary. You may find my introduction to the poem here.

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Good kings and unnamed women

We open with a King of the Danes, Shield Sheafson, who begins life as a foundling, we are told. This tells us a couple of things: first, it disrupts any assumptions we may have about primogeniture: this is not the eldest son of a former king, as far as we know; second, the name tells us something about a king’s role. He is a “Shield” to his people—a protector. He is “son of Sheaf.” A “sheaf” is a bundle of wheat, so this suggests that a king also provides for his people.

What do we learn about this king? Well, he seems pretty terrifying, as he invades and sacks other territories and takes them under his control. Our poet’s only comment on this reputation is to tell us: “That was one good king” (line 11). Take note of that clause, because it is repeated twice more in the poem about two other kings: Hrothgar and Beowulf. We may note that these are three very different sorts of kings that warrant this description, and so one thematic through-line is an extended political meditation on what constitutes good kingship.

Almost as soon as he is introduced, we have his funeral—a so-called “ship funeral,” in which the body is sent out to sea. (It is worth noting that there are other types of ship funerals where the ship is buried—for example the famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo, the discovery of which was dramatized in the recent movie The Dig, which I highly recommend.)

We have an example here of how the poem collapses time: the arrival, rise, and death of Shield are presented to us like a series of pictures on a wall. And immediately thereafter, the generations that form his legacy appear in quick succession: Beow, Halfdane, Hrothgar and his siblings. Note that the names of all of the siblings are given, except for that of the sister, who is identified only as the wife of Onela, the Swedish king. This immediately signals something about the plight of women in the poem: married off to a hostile power, with very little agency, and apparently not worth naming. Both the first and last women who are mentioned in the poem remain unnamed—though there are some significant, named women in between.

But why marry her to a Swede? We find out in the course of the poem that the Swedes are trouble. Like Fortinbras in Hamlet (though he is Norwegian), they are ready to sweep down from the north and invade at the least sign of weakness. The Swedes are always lurking on the margins in this poem. Clearly, the marriage is for some sort of political purpose, a peace-treaty in human form, though these treaties rarely work for long, as we shall see, and the women are often left mourning the dead of both sides after violence erupts.

Hrothgar, our second “good king,” comes to power, and he builds a great hall, Heorot, and again time collapses, as we hear of the hall’s destruction at the same moment that we hear of its building.

Tip for reading: our poet will sometimes juxtapose two events or ideas without comment. He leaves the interpretive, analytical work to the reader. Our first mention of Grendel follows immediately upon the account of Heorot’s destruction, and yet Grendel is not the ultimate cause of this destruction. What do we make of this juxtaposition?

Mære Mearcstapa

A rule of thumb for this poem is that if times are good, then something bad is coming, and soon. Time collapses:

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon,
haunting the marshes [. . .] (lines 99-103)

What Heaney translates as “haunting the marshes” (mære mearcstapa) might be more literally rendered as “marsh-stepper,” or, as Klaeber’s glossary has it, “wanderer in the waste borderland.” This is my favorite descriptive phrase for Grendel, partly because I like the sound of the Old English, but also because it indicates his status as outcast, as marginalized, as a wandering, restless spirit in the desolate places where we fear to venture.

The poet explains Grendel’s marginalized state by associating him with the biblical figure of Cain, the Bible’s first murderer, who is cast out by God for the killing of Abel, his brother. This also may be why Grendel is so intolerant of the joyful sounds of the hall and the singer’s poem of creation: this is the soundscape of civilization, of art, of culture, and he is privy to none of it.

So, the next time the grumpy old man next door complains because your music is too loud, just be thankful that he doesn’t break into your house and eat you—which is exactly what Grendel does; in fact, the poet tells us that he grabs thirty (!) men and brings them back to his lair to devour. (Later on we find out that he has a magic pouch made of dragon scales, which apparently enables him to carry all of these corpses.)

This goes on for twelve years, and we are told, curiously, that Grendel will not “pay the death-price” (OE wergild), which means that he refuses to pay recompense—a legal Old English payment to atone for murder. Well, of course he doesn’t. He is a monster, an outcast, and he follows no human law.

Humanoid monsters and monstrous humans

Tip for reading: we don’t learn Beowulf’s name for quite a while, not until line 343, or more than 10% of the way through the poem. However, Beowulf introduces himself through other means: where he comes from, who his father is, who his lord is. Also, when he addresses Hrothgar, he gives him any number of honorifics (“prince of the Bright-Danes,” “friend of the people,” “nation’s shield,” etc.). This is an Old English convention—to provide multiple descriptive titles for important people. Rather than thinking of it as repetitive or beating about the bush, consider the narrative and descriptive work that these name-substitutes accomplish. (The famous “Hymn” of the poet Caedmon, whom I discussed last week, gives us nine different name-substitutes for God.)

And speaking of Beowulf’s name, where does it come from, and does it mean anything? There are no Old English records or genealogies outside of this poem that refer to the name “Beowulf.” All other names in the poem appear elsewhere—but not the name of our hero. Make of that what you will. It certainly points toward his singularity.

There are a couple of different possible etymological explanations for his name. The most recent and probable scholarly theory, expounded by R. D. Fulk and Joseph Harris (see the Norton Critical Edition, pp. 105-107) is that it fits into a Nordic naming tradition, using the suffix -ulf (“wolf”) attached to the name of a god, as in “Thorulf” or “Thorolf” in Icelandic. This would make Beowulf the “wolf,” or scourge, of the god “Beow.”

Ok, that’s fine. But I prefer the older explanation. It may be outdated, but it is much cooler: “beo” derives from the OE word for bee, and so that makes “Beowulf” a “ravager of bees,” or, in short, a bear. I do have other, better reasons for preferring this explanation in addition to the coolness factor: this identification of Beowulf as bear-like suggests an association with the category of the berserker. In the Icelandic sagas, berserkers tend to be out of control and rather unsavory, but in some of the older, legendary texts, they are actual shape-shifters, who turn into bears or wolves, who are immune to blades and shed their armor in order to go into battle naked, without weapons, as they go into a kind of battle trance or rage. The word berserk derives from the Old Icelandic for “bear” and “shirt.” So, when you go into battle, you put on your bear-shirt.

No, not that kind of bear-shirt! Photo by Vish K on Unsplash

Beowulf sheds his armor before fighting Grendel and uses his bare hands rather than weapons. Later on in the poem, he says that he defeated “Dayraven the Frank” by squeezing him to death: “my bare hands stilled his heartbeats / and wrecked the bone-house” (lines 2507-2508). This is berserker-like behavior.

Furthermore, Beowulf observes that Grendel doesn’t use weapons either, and the poet tells us later that the monster is immune to them. This seems to establish some sort of monstrous equivalence between Beowulf and Grendel. While Grendel grabs thirty men, Hrothgar claims that Beowulf has the strength of thirty men in each hand. To be able to defeat a monster with his bare hands, Beowulf must be monstrous himself.

This kind of bear-shirt! Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

(This berserker argument, by the way, is not at all a scholarly consensus; it is, rather, my eccentric reading. But it’s my newsletter, so I make the rules. Ha! Take that, peer review!)

Bear, ravager of bees. Actual picture of Beowulf (artist’s rendering).

Unferth and flyting

In Sunday’s post, I referred to

Jay Giles

’s reading of Beowulf’s speeches, which includes a discussion of the argument with Unferth over his youthful swimming contest with a certain Breca. Let me know in the comments what you think of this debate. Why do you think we have apparent disagreement around the facts of this story? (“Alternative facts”?) This sort of exchange of insults in a poem, by the way, is called a flyting, a tradition that carries on from Beowulf to Big Daddy Kane.

The Grendel fight . . .

. . . speaks for itself, but I do want to point out that the poet describes Grendel’s death in a peculiar way:

[. . .] But his going away
out of this world and the days of his life
would be agony to him, and his alien spirit
would travel far into fiends’ keeping. (Lines 804-807)

This suggests that Grendel has a soul, that he is, in this way, human, or at least humanoid. His soul leaves his body and travels “into fiends’ keeping,” or Hell. We might see these lines as the completion of the narrative of the Cain connection—as Grendel is outcast in death as he is in life.

A close reading

Let’s look a bit more closely at Shield Sheafson’s funeral, specifically the moment at which the Danes send his body out to sea. Here is the Old English:

Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan,
þeodgestreonum, þonce þa dydon
þe hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.
þa gyt hie him asetton segen geldenne
heah ofer heafod, leton holm beran,
geafon on garsecg; him wæs geomor sefa,
murnende mod. Men ne cunnon
secgan to soðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng. (Lines 43-52)

Here is my reading of the final two clauses (with accompanying sounds of my dog chewing on a toy, which seems oddly appropriate):

And here is Heaney’s rendering:

They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. (Lines 43-52)

I have chosen this passage to discuss because it captures with remarkable subtlety what I see as the ontological melancholy of the poem. Let’s take it bit-by-bit:

• The opening, extended clause once again collapses time, invoking Shield’s arrival as a foundling in the same moment that it gives an account of his funeral, the two of which parallel each other as sea passages. Furthermore, the clause is a melancholy example of litotes, a rhetorical trope which, essentially, means “understatement by negation of the opposite.” The Danes have piled up treasures on Shield’s funeral ship, which makes a profound contrast to his arrival as a child when he was destitute, so “no less bountifully” is an understatement. Watch for the use of litotes in the poem. It is one of our poet’s favorite tropes.

• The second clause here describes the Danes’ sending out of the ship. While some ship funerals involved setting the ship on fire, this, apparently, is not the case here. Shield is simply allowed to “drift / to wind and tide” (“letton holm beran / geafon on garsecg”). I think that this decision not to burn the ship is a conscious one on the part of the poet, because it emphasizes the unknowability of the fate of the vessel and of Shield’s body, which is another source of sadness in this passage.

• In the third clause, the poet tells us that not even the wisest of the Danes could tell the fate of the ship. This is, of course, literally true, but it also works through metonymy: not one of these poor pagans could know the fate of Shield’s soul after death. Our Christian poet sees this as a source of profound melancholy. This is the reason for the phrase “him wæs geomor sefa,” which might be more literally translated as “they were sad in their hearts.” This is another repeated phrase that we see pop up again in the poem in moments of sorrow, as we shall see. The verb that Heaney translates as “salvaged” (“onfeng”) could also be rendered as “pulled in,” which I think resonates with the possibility of a divine force, for good or ill, embracing the departed king.

That’s my take on this week’s reading. Again, please comment on any bits that I left out if you have questions or observations.

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For next week

I suggest reading through line 2199, which takes us through the next monster fight and back home to the land of the Geats.

Some questions for your consideration and discussion:

1. In Heorot after the defeat of Grendel, the singer delivers two poems in celebration. The first poem celebrates another famous monster killer, but the second is a terrifying, obscure story of revenge and murder, the so-called “saga of Finn.” What do you think this is doing here? How does it affect our reading of this episode? Remember, our poet sometimes works through unexplained juxtapositions.

2. How does our second monster encounter differ from the first, and how are these differences interesting or significant?

3. We have two contrasting manifestations of the feminine in this section: Wealtheow and Grendel’s mother. Comments on this?

4. Critical commentary often skips over Beowulf’s account of his adventures to Hygelac after his return home, since it is at least partly redundant. What do you think it accomplishes, if anything?

Some links (thanks to

Terry Freedman

,

A. Jay Adler

, and

Jenn Zuko

:

• A BBC documentary about the poem

• Heaney reading the poem

• Benjamin Bagby performing the poem in Old English

• A reading of Headley’s fun new, slang-filled translation

Please consider the comment section below your open thread for the week, for discussion of this week’s reading or next week’s.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Limepic on Unsplash