The Dragon, the Treasure, and Radical Empathy

Beowulf Challenge, Week Five

Dear reader,

Last week we looked at the final part of the poem, after Beowulf’s ascent to the throne of the Geats. We considered his perspective as he prepares for the dragon fight, as he recounts the sorrow of King Hrethel and his own heroic trajectory. But we have some significant questions remaining. What is the nature of the dragon, and what purpose does it serve in the poem? What does the future hold in store for the Geats after Beowulf’s death? How do we interpret the Geats’ final assessment of their king as they mourn him?

We will address these questions today, but there are not definitive answers, so I look forward to your interpretations and ideas in the comments. We will also consider Tolkien’s essay on the poem, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in relation to some of these questions. If you have the Norton Critical Edition of the poem, you will find the essay in the back of the book.

Thanks to all of you who have participated in the Challenge. We have created such a nice community here, and I hope that you will join us for future reading challenges and all of the other forthcoming fun here at PCF.

Yours,

John

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

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The Dragon and the treasure

In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien, then a young philologist rather than a household name, published a lecture that he had delivered to the British Academy entitled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In this lecture, Tolkien challenged what was at the time the conventional wisdom on the poem, at least in critical terms, which claimed that the poem was interesting primarily because of the limited information that it provided around the dynastic narratives and early northern European history. The poem’s “radical defect,” according to such critics, was “a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges.” Such was the judgment of W. P. Ker in his tremendously influential book, The Dark Ages. By “irrelevances,” he meant, essentially, the monsters. The other great scholars of the previous generation, R. W. Chambers and Ritchie Girvan, whom Tolkien also cites, concurred with this assessment.

Tolkien was friends with these people, and he was their junior colleague. (A few years ago, when I was delving in the R. W. Chambers archive at University College London, I came across a letter from Tolkien in his unmistakable, spidery hand—not a momentous letter, since it was largely a complaint about the weather and the state of his garden.) But, despite these friendly relations, in this essay he doesn’t just disagree with their critical opinions of the poem; he obliterates them.

The monsters, for Tolkien, were not “irrelevances.” On the contrary, they form the literary, cultural, and psychological bases of the poem. For both the Christian poet and his pagan ancestors, the monsters were profoundly important, a source of real, existential terror: “The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host.” And though the Christian revelation had altered this perspective, “a Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God.”

While the poet associates Grendel with the kin of Cain, the dragon’s origins are more mysterious—and more alien. Grendel and his mother are humanoid, but the dragon is of another order entirely, a creature of primal terror, a self-guided weapon of mass destruction, borne out of the dark places in the earth and inextricably linked to the precious treasure that the earth yields.

The awakening of the dragon may have felt familiar to first-time readers who know Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in which the bourgeois “burglar,” Bilbo Baggins, awakens and angers Smaug the dragon, as he absconds with a precious object. This, of course, is not a coincidence. Our unnamed burglar in the poem must, I think, have been a hobbit.¹

The burglar resonates, for the poet, with the nameless “last survivor” of an extinct people, who in the distant past consigned this treasure to the earth. In a startling imaginative leap, our poet reanimates this anonymous ancient voice in one of the most haunting passages in the poem, in which he remembers everything that has departed from this world:

. . . No trembling hawk
swerving through the hall, no swift horse
pawing the courtyard. Pillage and slaughter
have emptied the earth of entire peoples. (Lines 2262-2265)

The survivor’s final action is to bury the treasure where it lies undisturbed until “an old harrower of the dark / happened to find the hoard open” (lines 2270-2271).

Like Tolkien’s Smaug, the poem’s dragon simply guards the treasure for three hundred years. For what purpose? It doesn’t matter: for the dragon, the dragon is the treasure and the treasure is the dragon.

And here is the great paradox of treasure in the poem: in order for it to serve culture, it must not be hoarded. It must circulate; it must be given and received, but with this circulation comes inevitable violence. The great peace-keepers of the poem—Hrothgar, Beowulf—are great ring-givers, distributors of treasure. But the accumulation of treasure attracts and perpetuates slaughter. Seen simplistically, the dragon could be viewed allegorically in this context, as Tolkien writes, “the conception [. . .] approaches draconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life), and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life).”

Like the two fateful urns of Zeus that Achilles describes in the final book of the Iliad, the dragon, in this sense, is doom—is wyrd—in all its terrifying capriciousness. The dragon provides the limit of the efficacy of heroic action. Beyond the dragon is death, the void.

It is in this context that the poet regards the treasure, as the Geats reinter it, “as useless to men now as it ever was” (“eldum swa unnyt swa hit æror wæs,” line 3168). It lies buried, ready to be rediscovered by another tribe—or by another dragon, who may set the earth alight to defend its uselessness. We do not know what the future may hold.

The beasts of battle are waiting. Photo by Sergio Ibannez on Unsplash

Wiglaf and the future

Something that very few critics remark upon is that it is, indirectly, Beowulf’s generosity that defeats the dragon. As Wiglaf witnesses his king’s desperate fight, he is moved by the memory of his gifts, and by the reciprocal oath that he has made. Though Beowulf dies, it is Wiglaf’s selfless action, despite his king’s command not to join the fight, that gives him the chance to bring the dragon down with him.

What are the implications of this narrative turn? Most obviously, it indicates that Beowulf cannot defeat the dragon alone, that heroic action and indomitable will can carry him only so far. More subtly, however, I think that it recalls Beowulf’s speech about the sorrow of Hrethel, which we discussed last week. That speech suggests that despair in response to a future that appears bleak is a mistake—because we do not know the future. Hrethel saw no hope for his people after the death of his eldest son, but he did not foresee the meteoric rise of Beowulf. The remainder of the poem after Beowulf’s death once again suggests that the future looks bleak, but we do not know the future.

Will Wiglaf rise and protect the Geats from the Swedes and future monsters? We do not know the answer, because it does not fall within the remit of our poem. He might do so, despite the despair of the Geats at this moment. The messenger who bears the news of Beowulf’s death invokes the “beasts of battle” trope, common in Old English and Old Icelandic poetry, which foretells coming slaughter:

[. . .] the swept harp
won’t waken warriors, but the raven winging
darkly over the doomed will have news,
tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,
how the wolf and he made quick work of the dead. (Lines 3024-3027)

The Swedes will come: this we know. The unnamed Geat woman, like Hildeburh in the Finnsburg episode, can only mourn as the flame consumes the body of her beloved lord, and as she imagines the inevitable war to come:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke. (Lines 3150-3155)

These lines resonate all too clearly into our own century, with our planet torn apart by war and greed, by wholesale destruction of our ecology, as the innocent suffer and die. Treasure, then as now, allows our culture to flourish even as it carries the seeds of its destruction. The dragon is always looming. So what hope is there?

“Manna mildust”

The answer may lie in the last three lines of the poem, wherein we may find some hope. This is not to suggest that the poem is optimistic—far from it—but at the same time it does not close the door on the future. These lines convey the Geats’ assessment of Beowulf’s greatness, and they do so with four superlatives:

They said that of all the kings upon earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame. (lines 3180-3182)

Note that they don’t call him the strongest or the most powerful. The first superlative is perhaps the most surprising: “manna mildust,” literally “the mildest of men.” Next is “mon-ðwærust,” which is “the gentlest.” He is “leodum liðost,” or “the kindest to his people.”

These first three descriptors would not be out of place in an assessment of a good Christian, which may reflect the poet’s values. However, it is once again worth remembering Beowulf’s fifty years of peaceful rule also as reflective of these values, as well as the generosity to which Wiglaf attests. But in any case, it may be a surprising place for this poem of slaughter and monster-killing to land—at least if we haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The final superlative, however, would seem out of place in a Christian poem of praise: “lofgeornost.” Heaney translates this as “keenest to win fame.” The word is a compound: lof, which becomes Modern English love, is praise or glory: georn is the verb that will become yearn; and ost is the superlative suffix. So, he is the one who “yearns most for glory.” This sounds like the Christian sin of pride.

But this, I think, would be an anachronistic assessment, if not for the poet, then for Beowulf himself. Remember his words to Hrothgar regarding mortality: we all must die, and so “let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, / that will be his best and only bulwark” (lines 1387-1389). When we consider this perspective, then we can perhaps translate lofgeornost as something like “the one who most desires to perform great deeds.”

And herein lies the hope, both for the poem and for us: in the human ambition to do good things aligned with the qualities of mildness, gentleness, and kindness. It is radical empathy and compassion in conjunction with the desire to leave the world a better place than we found it.

The poem does not predict, but it does prescribe.

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Thanks to all who have joined our journey through this great poem. I know that some of you have chimed in on the end of the poem in the comments to previous posts, and some of you have asked questions. I think that I have answered most of them, either directly or in this final piece. But once again, please consider the comment section below your forum to continue the conversation, which I will happily join.

Over the next month or so, we have plenty of fun lined up at PCF: listening challenges, stand-alone essays, and more Stacks of the Week. And remember, the Lord of the Rings Challenge will begin March 13th! I hope that all of you will join us as we read Tolkien together.

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

Actual photo of the Beowulf-poet’s typewriter. Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash

1. For those with defective irony detectors, I must clarify that I don’t really think this.