Beowulf 165Grendel’s mother proves a tougher challenge for
Beowulf than does her son, but the dragon costs him
his life. The dragon is the opposite of the good king
the poet takes such pains to construct for his audi-
ence. Instead of freely giving treasure, it hoards it. It
is miserly and greedy, sitting alone atop its hoard in
a cold and dark anti-hall. These monsters are both
exterior threats to the community and projections of
repressed evils within that community.
Tony Perrello
reliGiOn in Beowulf
Religion is a source of mystery in the poem Beowulf
and a divisive issue among its readers. Christianity
plays an ambiguous role in this poem about pagan
heroes and monsters, but it is ultimately responsible
for the poem’s preservation. As Roy Liuzza has
noted in the preface to his 2000 translation, many
scholars see the hero, Beowulf, as a Christ figure, one
who gives his life for his people in a struggle with a
serpent hostile to mankind. Others have argued that
the poem—with its ultimate vision of doom and
futility in the face of human greed and ongoing
violence—is a condemnation of a pagan world that
thrived on domination and conquest.
Beowulf certainly offers a portrait of a world
before Christ. In lines 175–188, the poet condemns
the heathenish Danes, who turn to idol wor-
ship when plagued with Grendel. The burial rites
depicted in the poem, usually involving a burning
pyre, are markedly pagan. Christ is never men-
tioned. Fate is stern and implacable, and worldly
glory seems to be the only lasting virtue, leaving the
final words of the poem ambiguous—was Beowulf a
humble Christ figure or one eager for earthly fame?
There is only one historically datable event in
the poem: the death of Hygelac, lord of the Geats,
sometime between 521 and 526 (the Frankish
historian Gregory of Tours recorded the death of
“Chlochilaichus”—the Latin form of “Hygelac”—in
521). Although the Roman emperor Constantine
had converted to Christianity in the fourth century,
it was not until the year 597 that Saint Augustine
of Canterbury undertook his mission of conversion
in the southern reaches of the Anglo-Saxon king-
doms. The Northern Anglo-Saxons had previously
received the word of God from Irish missionaries,
and within less than a century after Saint Augustine
set out, the entire island had been converted.
The scribes who wrote down Beowulf sometime
around the year 1000 were Christian. At the time
of the poem’s composition, “writing” was done
exclusively by monks working in monasteries. Since
parchment (sheepskin) was expensive, only works
deemed valuable were copied and preserved. The
manuscript that contains Beowulf also contains a
saint’s life (The Passion of Saint Christopher) and a
versified story from the Bible (The book of Judith).
Although references to the Bible are exclusively from
the Old Testament, the “poet” (or is it the scribe?)
expects his audience to be familiar with biblical sto-
ries, such as that of Cain in Genesis, whose fratricide
gave rise to Grendel and thus makes Unferth sinister
through association. When Hrothgar examines the
sword hilt taken from the lair of Grendel’s mother,
the poet alludes to the apocryphal Old Testament
story of God’s destruction of the race of giants by
flood (ll. 1,688ff.).
For centuries Beowulf was sung, by memory, to
the accompaniment of a harp. This oral formulaic
poem of the sixth through 10th centuries, then,
received its Christian coloration when recorded by
monastic scribes around the year 1000. Sometime
in the late seventh century, a monk known as the
Venerable Bede recorded what is perhaps the first
English poem—“Caedmon’s Hymn.” Caedmon, an
illiterate cowherd who worked in a monastery in
Whitby (northeast England), was, legend has it,
visited by an angel in a dream and given the power
of song, spontaneously singing a song of creation—
“Caedmon’s Hymn.” Caedmon refers to God by
such epithets as “Master Almighty,” “Mankind’s
Guardian,” “Eternal Lord,” and “Measurer”—hardly
the meek lamb of the New Testament. For the first
time in history, heroic language and the meter of
heroic battle poetry were applied to a religious text, a
literary moment known as the Caedmonian Revolu-
tion. The Beowulf poet applies this strategy time and
again, referring obliquely to God with heroic terms
such as “Wielder of All” or “Father Almighty.” And
for some readers of the poem, Beowulf is a type of
Christ, and his actions sometimes parallel biblical
or apocryphal events. For instance, Beowulf “har-
rows hell” to confront Grendel’s mother in a lair