Beowulf
Almost everything about Beowulf is a mystery. It survives in a single early 11th-century manuscript, the Nowell Codex, but as a story is certainly far older. It is likely to be a tale originally passed on orally by a scop (Anglo-Saxon minstrel), and there is fierce debate over when it was precisely composed. It tells a tale set in the Germanic past, when people were pagan and brutal (justified) violence was a commendable character trait, and yet was deemed worthy of being copied onto vellum (a very expensive proceeding) by a monk or clerk of a Christian establishment.
The story has what is known as ‘Christian colouring’, small references to Christianity presumably put in to justify its being copied into a manuscript by an ecclesiastical figure. There is further great debate over what else was added by the scribe. Despite being an Anglo-Saxon text and the English National Epic, none of the action takes place in England, but chiefly in Scandinavia and, briefly, northern continental Europe. There is even debate over the precise subject of the poem: is it the tale of three fights with monsters with added Germanic history, or are Beowulf’s monster-slayings just a frame narrative?
Regardless of the debate, Beowulf as it exists is a phenomenal text. It begins with Beowulf, a young warrior from Geatland (Southern Sweden), travelling to the court of King Hrothgar in Denmark. He is there to fulfil a debt of honour incurred by his father, by killing a monster which has been killing and eating Hrothgar’s men every night for many years. This monster is Grendel, a giant who brazenly enters Heorot, the mighty hall of Hrothgar, to capture his prey. Beowulf kills Grendel by ripping his arm off, fatally wounding him. Learning of this, Grendel’s Mother seeks revenge.
Beowulf then kills Grendel’s Mother in her lair (NB the subtle comparison between the monsters who kill Hrothgar’s men in their home and Beowulf’s actions here). The disturbing thing about the Grendelkin is that they are said to be descended from Cain (the fratricidal son of Adam and Eve), and are thus human, which makes their crimes all the more appalling. They also live in a place described in a deliberately similar manner to Heorot. Beowulf eventually becomes king of the Geats, and dies at a great age when killing a troublesome dragon, at which point the poem ends.
There is simply not enough space here to praise Beowulf‘s verbal artistry. The poem makes use of evocative compound nouns known as kennings (eg. swanrade, ‘swan-road’, or sea), litotes (dramatic understatement), and has some of the most harrowing descriptions of monsters in the English language. And yet there are also moving soliloquies on the transience of life and the uncertainty of fate, and an interrogation of what it means to be a hero. If you want to know more about Anglo-Saxon England, look no further – descriptive detail about armour and architecture in Beowulf has been verified by archaeologists.