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The Necessity of Evil in BeowulfAuthor(s): James W. EarlSource: South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 44, No. 1, (Jan., 1979), pp. 81-98Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3198900Accessed: 08/05/2008 15:05

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The Necessity Of Evil in Beowulf

James W. Earl

THE HISTORY OF BEOWULF CRITICISM through several generations of scholars is a long and sprawling debate in which certain central issues never seem finally resolved. The poem is enigmatic (or rich) enough to have invited an endless variety of approaches and interpretations, many of them mutually exclusive, but all, taken together, an oddly harmonious chorus of response. My own interpretation of these issues focuses on the way in which the poet presents a few clearly symbolic portions of the narrative and explicates them for us himself in the poem.

A brief look at the dragon of the last episode provides one of the clearest examples of this sort of explication. Since we have in the poem itself a digression on the history of the gold-hoard and its guardian dragon, we need not begin the project of determining their functions in the poem by searching outside the poem for analogues. In this digression, commonly called "The Lay of the Last Survivor," an old man, who has lived to see his whole nation perish and its culture fall into ruin, walks through his empty town; he laments the impermanence of the things of the world, and buries the treasures of his ancient civilization in the earth. These are the treasures guarded by the dragon which will ultimately kill Beowulf. There is a fundamental moral discovery attached to the old man's action, which is explicit in his speech:

"Earth, hold now the possessions of earls; now men cannot. Good men obtained them from you before; death in battle, deadly trouble, has taken each of the bold men of my race; they knew the joys of the hall, and now life has left them. O who might now wear the sword or polish the ornamented cup, the precious drinking-bowl? The warriors have all gone elsewhere. The plated gold of the king's helmet shall fall away; the treasure-keeper sleeps who would polish the

82 Beowulf

war-masks; and the armor which in battle endured the bite of swords behind the breaking of shields, decays with the hero. The rings of the chain-mail will no longer travel abroad on the warrior. No longer the joy of the harp, the song of the instrument; no longer does the good hawk swing thrugh the hall; no longer does the town resound with the swift horses. Violent death has sent the race of heros elsewhere." (11.2247-66)1

The history of the gold-hoard in this digression prefaces the main narrative of Beowulf's dragon-fight and is related to it in two ways. First of all, it attaches a moral significance to the treasure which the dragon guards. Everything we know about this hoard tells us that this is a treasure which should indeed be guarded; it is emblematic of the awful truth that treasure, and worldly achieve- ment in general, cannot secure a culture against its inevitable decay. It is emblematic of the truth which the whole poem illustrates, that worldly success is only temporary, or perhaps even illusory. The

dragon who guards this hoard does not seem necessarily to be a

representative of evil. Rather, the beast serves the wisdom and the moral vision of the Last Survivor. And guarding barrows is the natural function of dragons-and a morally neutral function

perhaps, as we can see in these lines from the Cotton gnomes ("Maxims II"):

Masts are on ships, they hold up the sails; swords lie on the breast, noble irons; dragons are in barrows, old, wise, and treasure-proud; fish are in the water, they bring forth their own; kings are in the hall, they deal out rings. (11.24-29)2

Our dragon, then, seems to be morally significant, though not

necessarily evil. In fact, in both Beowulf (1. 2277) and the gnomes (1. 27) the dragon is described as frod (old and wise). The most

important question, of course, is why Beowulf has to combat the

beast, and perish in the process. Let me just suggest for now that Beowulf's death is after all an illustration of the truth which the hoard represents, from the evidence of the Last Survivor's speech.

The second way in which the digression helps to clarify the

significance of Beowulf's struggle with the dragon is that it is a clear prophecy of Beowulf's fall at the poem's conclusion. For not

only are we told at great length that in spite of Beowulf's long and

successful kingship, he and his race are doomed; but even more

pointedly, we are told rather unexpectedly at the very moment of his death that he and his one faithful retainer Wiglaf are them-

SAB 83

selves, very literally, last survivors. Beowulf's last words recall those of the Last Survivor; he says to Wiglaf:

"You are the last survivor [endelaf] of our race, the Waegmundings; fate has swept all of my kinsmen, valorous princes, to their destiny; I must follow them."

(11. 2813-16)

Wiglaf, learning his lesson from Beowulf's fate, hardly needs further instruction; and like the Last Survivor of the digression, he too buries the gold, and "they let the earth hold the treasure of earls, the gold in the ground, where it lies even now, as useless to men as it ever was" (11. 3166-68). And like the Last Survivor, Wiglaf does not bury the treasure for safekeeping-the English courts have even decided that question, in the celebrated case of Mrs. Pretty. The gold is not intended to be recovered; rather it is buried as an expression of a well-defined moral conviction-that moral conviction which the whole poem is meant to reinforce. Beowulf, his race, and his people fall victim at the end of the poem, not to sin, or avarice, or even evil (note that the Last Survivor de- scribes his ancestors who won the gold as "good men [gode]"); they fall victim, rather, to the simple truth about life, shared by both Germanic and Christian tradition, that the things of this world dreosap ond feallap, they "fade and fall away," to quote both Hrothgar and the Wanderer. The transience of worldly things, of course, is not an unusual theme on Old English poetry, but its expression in narrative form in Beowulf is more elaborate and powerful than in any other of our poems.

In the history of the gold-hoard, then, we can see the controlling theme of the poem clearly expressed, and we can see how the poet explicates his symbols within the poem, with the aid of the so- called "digressive" episodes. When we turn now to the problems of Grendel and his mother, we can call attention to another in- stance of the way in which the poet provides us with his own emblematic exegesis of the symbols he uses.

After all other tactics fail, Beowulf kills Grendel's mother with a magic sword which he finds hanging on the wall of her cave. This is the only sword which can harm the monsters, who have laid a curse on weapons which has made them invulnerable to all but this one. Beowulf brings the hilt of the sword back to Heorot and presents it to Hrothgar along with Grendel's head. Hrothgar examines the hilt, and we are told that

On it was engraved the beginning of the ancient warfare, when the flood, the rushing sea, slew the race of giants; they suffered terribly; that was a people alien to the eternal

84 Beowulf

Lord; for this [paes] God gave them a final punishment with surging water. Also, it was written clearly in runic letters of shining gold on the sword-guard, set down and announced, for whom [hwam-perhaps "by whom"] that sword, the best of irons, with wound hilt and serpent- ornaments, was first made.

(11. 1687-98)

On the sword itself is pictured the image of God's judgment upon the race of giants. These, of course, are the giants of Genesis 6.4, the "giants in the earth in those days," who so angered God that He flooded the earth. They are commonly understood to be the des- cendants of Cain, and therefore the not-too-distant cousins of Gren- del and his mother. The engraved sword actually announces itself, then, as a sword of divine judgment upon the race of Cain, and thus announces its own role in the poem, after its purpose has been

accomplished in the death of Grendel and his mother. We are not told how the sword came into the possession of Cain's kin, the very race whose destruction it depicts; we certainly cannot imagine Grendel and his mother taking joy or comfort in this particular heirloom. I suspect we are meant to savor the irony of the sword's

history. We are not even told for whom (or by whom) the sword was made, though the poet devotes five lines to the golden runes which inform Hrothgar of what would seem a very significant detail. My own guess is that since God is the author of the judgment pictured on the hilt-and since His intervention in the battle with Grendel's mother is relatively clear-then we might reasonably infer that God is the author of the sword of judgment as well. In any case, though the poet tantalizes us with this mystery, the picture on the hilt is clear enough: it is a prophecy revealed to us after its fulfillment, and in its place in the poem it is an iconographic com-

mentary upon the destruction of the race of Grendel, which Beowulf has just accomplished.

Now twice in the poem the monsters are described as being des- cended from Cain and related to the giants. And the first of these

passages also mentions God's punishment of the giants, which we see pictured on the sword-hilt much later in the poem. Grendel is introduced into the narrative with these lines:

The grim spirit was named Grendel, an infamous outcast who held the moors, a stronghold in the fens; the gloomy creature had lived in the realm of monsters ever since God had proscribed him among the kin of Cain-whom the eternal Lord punished because he slew Abel; God

hardly rejoiced in that feud, but for that crime he exiled Cain far from mankind. Thence came horrible progeny-

SAB 85

eotens and elves and orks, and also the giants, who strove against God for a long time [pa wif Gode wunnon lange Jrage]. He paid them a reward for that [daes].

(11. 102-14) The punishment which is here referred to ironically as the giants' lean is, of course, the flood. That Grendel will be punished as well is implied only twenty lines later, when the poet summarizes his crimes by saying of him, as of the giants, "He strove against the right, for a long time (wifd rihte wan. . . . waes se hwil micel)" (11. 144-46). We can see here a very interesting narrative technique: just as the prophetic quality of the episode of the Last Survivor is not revealed for us until after it has been fulfilled, when we are finally told that Beowulf and Wiglaf are also last survivors, so here the force of the poet's reference to the giants and their destruction at the beginning of the poem is only made clear 1600 lines later, when the sword-hilt is described; and only then do we learn the true significance of the sword, whose function in the narrative has already been fulfilled. The thematic connection between Grendel's race and that of the giants can be perceived most clearly after the one has finally been "rewarded" like the other.

I will digress for a moment to recall how characteristic of the poem this technique is. The clearest and most dramatic example of it involves the two most vexing episodes of the poem. The "Finn episode," with its intricate balance of loyalties, alliances, marriages, and betrayals, seems at the time of its telling to have no particular relation to the main narrative, or to its setting in Hrothgar's court. But a thousand lines later, when Beowulf has returned to Geatland and gives an account of his adventures to Higelac, we can perceive the fine-honed irony of the story of Finn in its earlier setting; for in the "Heathobard digression" Beowulf predicts, based on what he had learned in conversation at the banquet where the story was told, that the Danes and the Heathobards will become entangled in a nearly parallel set of loyalties and betrayals, which will lead in the end to the destruction of Heorot itself. When the tale was told at Heorot, neither Hrothgar or the reader realized how prophetic it was; only Beowulf saw the irony, but we learn of his perception only much later in the poem. This technique, which gives the Finn and Heathobard episodes their raison d'etre, is also at work in the Lay of the Last Survivor, and the various references to the giants and the sword; and it is illustrative of the poem's sophisticated but often unappreciated narrative technique.

Now to return to my main narrative: there is no mystery about the significance of the monsters' kinship with Cain, which clearly identifies them with evil. Regarding Cain's kin, Augustine in the

86 Beowulf

City of God develops at great length an idea which became com- monplace in the Middle Ages, that Cain is the founder of the Earthly City, the spiritual ancestor of its citizens, and a prototype for sinful and unrepentant man. And the murder of Abel is under- stood as an example and archetype of crime, and thus in a special sense as its cause-the first blow in the continuous murderous war- fare which has characterized subsequent history.3 While Augustine is hardly an esoteric source for the ideas which we might find in Beowulf, we needn't even go that far-the gnomes of the Exeter Book ("Maxims I") end with the following lines:

There has been a war among mankind since first the earth drank the blood of Abel. From that bloody crime it was not just one day's warfare which arose widely among men of many nations, woe blended with violence. Cain slew his own brother, he devised that murder. Afterwards it was

widely known that unending hatred oppressed men, so that peoples endured the clash of weapons all over the earth, and devised and hardened the destroying sword.

(11. 192-200)4

But what interests me more than the evil nature of the monsters, which is apparent, is their function in the poem, the moral signi- ficance of their attack on the Danes and of Beowulf's victory over them. Regarding the monsters, the poet has provided us not only with a history, as he has with the gold-hoard and the sword-hilt, but a homiletic commentary as well.

"Hrothgar's Sermon" serves not only as a transition between the two parts of Beowulf, but also as a moral gloss on the narrative, both in retrospect and as prophecy. The sermon has received its fair share of comment, since it is so clearly important to any inter-

pretation of the poem. But one part of the sermon, which is very significant for an understanding of the whole narrative, has pretty much been ignored. After the theoretical discussion of kingship which is so well known, Hrothgar's words become more pointed. He casts a gloomy shadow on the festivities by telling Beowulf he is doomed to die, "by sickness or the sword, or the embrace of

flames, or the surging of water, or the grip of the knife, or the

flight of the arrow, or horrible old age." "Very soon," he tells Beowulf, "death will overcome you" (11. 1761-68).

This somber pronouncement is really quite startling in the

context of the feast, but is not unmotivated. It is based on Hroth-

gar's experience within the poem; it is the conclusion he has drawn

from the attack of the monsters upon his stronghold and upon his

seemingly secure kingship. In these lines and the lines which follow,

SAB 87

he explains to Beowulf what the monsters have taught him; he makes an exemplum of himself; and in a sense he provides a moral commentary on the first part of the poem. In a manner reminiscent of so much Christian literature, he stops the action for a moment, and announces "the moral of this story is this":

"So I for fifty years ruled the Ring-Danes under the clouds, and protected them against war with many tribes, against spears and swords, until I thought I had no enemy under the expanse of the sky. But lo, for this[paes] a reversal befell me in my homeland, grief after joy, when Grendel, the ancient adversary, came to visit me. I suffered that persecution, a great mind-care, for a long time."

(11. 1769-78)

Grendel, the kinsman of Cain, is certainly and unambiguously evil; but his persecution of Hrothgar has served a purpose, as a needed moral corrective for the king. In the end, its effect has been salu- tory, at least in this one particular way. Grendel began his perse- cution precisely at that time when Hrothgar had become misled, by his own successes as a king, into believing that his power might be unchallengable. The correction of this error is Grendel's one clearly expressed function in the poem. We might say, then, that the monsters' persecution of the Danes is in part a purposeful and a necessary evil; and in fact the diction of the poem defines the monsters very precisely in this way. To demonstrate this, I would like to focus very closely on two words, each of which recurs as a compound-element several times in the first part of the poem: sceaft (creation, or fate) and nyd (need, or necessity).

II

AT THE BEGINNING of the poem, as Grendel is preparing his first attack upon Heorot, we are told that the Danes who are sleep- ing in the hall "did not know sorrow, they did not know the wonsceaft wera (the dark fate of men)" (1. 119). Now the primary use of wan (which survives in Modern English "wan" and "wane") is as a privative prefix, indicating a lack of something, in the manner of our Modern English un-; but its meaning is extended in Old English (and at least once in Old Saxon) to mean "dark."5 (Interestingly, our Old English dictionaries classify these two mean- ings as different words with different spelling, but in use they are perfect homonyms.)6

The second element in wonsceaft is a rich and problematical word which hardly needs an introduction to Anglo-Saxonists: we have all stumbled over it many times-most memorably, perhaps, in

88 Beowulf

forpgesceaft in the "Dream of the Rood," and selfsceaft in "Gene- sis B," the subject of a fine essay by John Vickery.7 Primarily, the word means "creation" or "something created," and it usually im- plies, in compounds like this one, "from the creation," or, more precisely, "as a part of something's nature since or due to its creation." So by extension, of course, the word is often translated simply as "fate," which does capture the word's sense of natural inevitability. Our word "nature" can carry the sense of the Old English word very adequately: as when we say that man has a rational nature, or it is the nature of men to die; and our Modern English form of the word, "shape," can occasionally take on such a meaning, as when one student says to another before an exam that he is "in pretty good shape." But we can see how the translation "fate" could be misleading in its simplicity. Our word wonsceaft, indeed, has provided some very misleading simplicity, as when Klaeber and Wrenn both translate it simply as "misery." But the "wonsceaft of men" does not refer just to the misery of these par- ticular Danes, sleeping off their drunkenness; it refers rather to the "darkness" of men itself, the "darkness" of the human condition, of which the Danes are unaware.

Wonsceaft appears in Old English just one other time, in the Leechdoms, as the name of a disease which can be cured with a salve of pitch, vinegar, and rose-oil.8 It has not been determined what disease this is; we might, however, note Herbert Dean Meritt's

analysis of the word wanseoc as "darksick," the wan element here

indicating melancholy (or dark) humors.9 Wanseoc appears twice as a gloss for "epileptic"; I will hazard a guess that this meaning is not being referred to in Beowulf, though the use of wan in such a compound to mean dark or melancholy is perhaps not irrelevant to our discussion. We might more profitably compare the Old Saxon wanskefti, which appears in the Heliand (1. 1352), where it is said that those who are lustful and merry now will bewail their

wanskefti on Judgment Day. From our poem we know that the world dreosap and feallap, and since we have been referring to

Hrothgar's sermon, we should recognize what the wonsceaft wera is: it is exactly what Hrothgar has learned from his suffering in the first part of the poem.

Let us look at some other sceaft compounds in the poem. During the celebration at the great feast after Beowulf's first victory, the

poet interjects a sobering hint of the reversal which that night will

bring: "There was a fine feast; men drank wine; they did not know fate (wyrd), the geosceaft grimme (the grim ancient fate), as it would come about for many when evening came" (11. 1232-35). Geo, of course, simply indicates "long ago"; sceaft, as before, means

primarily "creation," "nature," or "fate." The grim geosceaft which

SAB 89

the warriors do not know has been established long ago, and is inexorably fated because implicit in the nature of things. The ele- ment sceaft clarifies the notion of wyrd mentioned in the same line, and separates it from the particular circumstances of these men; they are unaware not only of their own fates, but also of a more general fate, which is ancient and permanent. This "grim geosceaft" is not the particular coincidence of a monster in this hall on this night, but the long-established principle that there is always some danger threatening the halls of men. "The grim geosceaft" is an- other expression, actually, for "the wonsceaft of men."

A more precise definition of the "grim geosceaft" is provided for us only thirty lines later in the poem. The company goes to bed, and Grendel's mother is introduced. She is one of the horrible progeny of Cain, who "fled the joys of men and inhabitied the wilderness; from him were born many geosceaft-gasta (geosceaft- spirits), one of whom was Grendel" (11. 1262066). The "grim geo- sceaft" of which the drunken revelers are so blissfully and fatally unaware, then, is identified with the race of Cain and all it repre- sents. Evil in the world, like death, is "fated of old" and is a necessary part of man's lot. This notion of necessity is implied in the element sceaft itself; but we find it expressed even more directly in a web of words built on the element nyd.

Right after Grendel's first attack, we read that "the warfare was too hard, grievous and longlasting, which had befallen that people, the greatest of night-evils, a grim and violent nydwracu (literally, a "need-punishment") (11. 191-93). Wracu means in its broadest sense "suffering," but is used more commonly to mean "punish- ment" in particular, and in poetry and law it means "exile"-which is how we see it used most often, in the "Wanderer" and the "Sea- farer," for example. More interesting to us is the element nyd, which is Modern English "need," and means pretty much just that in Old English: "necessity" or "inevitability." The word nydwracu occurs only one other time in Old English, in "Guthlac A" (1. 553), where the nydwraece of devils are referred to; the adverbial form nyd- wraeclice occurs once as well, in one of Aelfric's Lives, and has been glossed "as if acting under compulsion, or forcibly driven";'0 the noun nydwraca occurs once also, as a legal term glossed by Bos- worth-Toller as "one who is forced to be an avenger." In these and other nyd compounds, the element nyd always implies force, neces- sity, or inevitability. Other examples: a nyd-wyrhta ("need-worker") is an indentured servent, and more interestingly, a nyd-fara is "one compelled to journey" (Exodus 208). It is puzzling then to see that Klaeber glosses nydwracu, which would seem to refer to the neces- sary or inevitable punishment, exile, or suffering of the Danes, simply as "dire distress."

90 Beowulf

The element nyd, used in compounds which describe the tribu- lation of the Danes, becomes almost a motif in the poem. For example, Beowulf ponders at one point whether or not Grendel is meant to be defeated-Fate might will it otherwise, after all-and he muses that if he should lose the battle, then Hrothgar "will suffer forever this preanyd (this sad necessity)" (11.283-85). In his exchange with Unferth, Beowulf says that Grendel is collecting a nydbade (a necessary or enforced toll) from the Danes (1. 598). After the first battle the poet refers again to the sorrow the Danes had to suffer "for preanydum" (1.832).

What exactly is this sad necessary affliction which the Danes suffer? It is made clear in one of the most startling passages in the poem, though one which has occasioned little comment. After the first battle, as the hall is being reassembled, the poet recalls the image of the doomed monster fleeing back to his lair, and he ser- monizes in an unexpected way upon Grendel's death:

The roof alone remained whole, when the monster, stained with crimes and despairing of life, took to flight. That is not easy to escape, try he who will: but compelled by necessity (nyde genydde), every soul-bearer, each of the sons of men, the earth-dwellers, must seek out the place prepared, where his body, fast in the death-bed, will sleep after the feast.

(11. 999-1008)

Here even Grendel's death is used as an exemplum, illustrating the

general fate of men which the word nyd connotes. Here the point is made doubly, as the poet hammers upon man's inevitable mor-

tality by describing those who must die (that is, all of us) as nyde genydde, "those compelled by necessity."

If we look through other Old English poetry, we will find that, as here, nyd always has negative connotations, and is often used

virtually as a synonym for death. Thus in "Bede's Death Song" death is the niedfaeru, the "necessary journey" (1. 1). Cynewulf says of himself in his runic signitures, "the nyd-companion suffered

heavy sorrow" (Elene, 1. 1260), and "on him nyd presses, the service of the King" ("Fates of the Apostles," 11. 104-105). Of this last, Brooks perceptively notes that "these lines refer not merely to the service of God, but also to the universal compulsion imposed by death.""l Most interesting of all is the little riddle describing the rune nyd in the "Rune Poem":

Nyd bip nearu on brostan, weorpep hi peah oft nipa pearnum to helpe and to haele gehweapre, gif hi his hlystap aeror.

(11. 27-28)

SAB 91

Nyd is heavy on the heart, though often it can be for the sons of men / both a help and salvation, if they prepare for it.)

And we see the word again in Beowulf, late in the poem, when a hypothetical king languishes to death because his son "came to his end purh deapes nyd (through necessity of death)" (1. 2454).

Nothing seems quite as inevitable as suffering and death; and in the Old English poetic diction the very word nyd comes to imply this truth. But just as editors and translators of Beowulf have simplified the words wonsceaft and geosceaft, and reduced their sig- nificance in the developing themes of the poem, so have they also managed to neutralize the nyd compounds. Wrenn, like Klaeber, reads nydwracu as "sore distress" or "violent trouble." But the neces- sary punishment or affliction of the Danes is much more than that- especially since Christian thought so clearly links the necessity of suffering and death with the notions of punishment and exile, in the story of the Fall. I suspect that the common gloss of nyd as "violence" or "trouble" is due to the gentle influence of the word nip (which does mean violence or trouble) upon the ears of scholars confronting these difficult and subtle constructions in the poem. Even Dobbie, in his comments on the "Rune Poem," glosses nyd as "affliction" or trouble,"13 confusing it with nip-probably be- cause the Icelandic form of the rune-word nyd is naup (which, however, also means "necessity," and is not cognate with Old English nip, as it might appear to be.

We are in no position, of course, to criticize the many scholars who have opened the way to understanding the Old English language; but it is useful to remember how much work is left to do, to define and redefine many Old English words and concepts.

III

With this brief look, then, at the way in which the diction of the poem supports my interpretation of the narrative, we can come back to the discussion of Grendel's function in the poem as an evil creature who plays a positive role in the shaping of Hrothgar's (and the poet's) moral vision, as it is expressed in Hrothgar's sermon. In what terms can we reconcile Grendel's evil nature and his role in God's plan as Hrothgar sees it?

Let us turn to the City of God, in which Augustine attempts to explain the function of evil in history. In his discussion of the fall of the angels he gives us this intriguing simile:

As the beauty of a picture is increased by well-managed shadows, so, to the eye that has skill to discern it, the uni-

92 Beowulf

verse is beautified even by sinners, though, considered by themselves, their deformity is a sad blemish." (XI. xxiii)

Perhaps the same appreciation of the role of evil in God's creation can be applied to Grendel, the "dark death-shadow" of Denmark. The same principle is applied by Augustine specifically to races of monsters:

The explanation for monstrous human births among us can also be applied to some of these monstrous races. For God is the creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any creature should be created. He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts, in their likeness and diversity. The observer who cannot view the whole is offended by what seems the de- formity of a part, since he does not know how it fits in, or how it is related to the rest. (XVI, viii)

And he says again: God would not have created any angel or man whose future wickedness He forknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses. (XI. xviii)

So, we see, the history of God's creation is exquisite-just as our

poem is-partly because of the beautiful and beneficial ways in which good and evil are set in opposition to each other.

The City of God is an especially appropriate place to turn for the ideas which inform Hrothgar's sermon. Augustine set out to demonstrate how the Christian might understand God's plan in

history, which must have seemed all the more dark and mysterious after the sack of Rome and the defilement of good Christian women there by the barbarians. Of course, his notion of the ways in which evil works to the benefit of good in history became the common

property of medieval thinkers after him. For example, Boethius

explains in the Consolation, "Only to divine power are evil things good, when it uses them so as to draw good effects from them"

(IV, pr. vi). The most interesting example for us, perhaps, is the Christian interpretation of the legendary history of Britain, as it was developed by Gildas, Bede, and Nennius during the Anglo- Saxon period. Just as Augustine had understood the barbarian in- vasion of Christian Rome as a part of God's plan, so these writers understood the invasion and destruction of the Roman-Christian nation of the Britons by the heathen Anglo-Saxons as a purposeful and ultimately beneficial act of God-Saint Germanus and King Arthur notwithstanding. This episode in England's national his-

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tory might have seemed to contradict all the expectations of the Christian historian; the Christians, after all, suffered disastrous defeat, and the heathen invaders massacred priests and monks in a blood-bath from one coast to the other. But even this reversal was understood as a part of God's design, His way of chastizing His chosen people for their sins.14

In the eleventh century, during the invasions of the Vikings, Wulfstan recalls God's punishment of the Britons six centuries earlier, in his Sermo Lupi. He warns against national complacency by observing that the sins of the English are as great as those of the Britons. His me;sage, of course, is that the attacks of the Vikings, as monstrous an enemy as they are, may just be God's way of teaching the English people a lesson. As in Biblical history, so also in the Christian interpretation of post-biblical history, and so also in our poem: it often happens that God uses evil; from time to time He even allows it to overcome the good, for reasons which may not be apparent, except "to the eye that has skill to discern" God's wisdom revealed in the past. History teaches; and the purpose of Christian historiography is to learn from it.

So Hrothgar's analysis of his own persecution at the end of his sermon, though it may still strike some as trivial moralizing, is actually an attempt to understand history-he searches for the moral in his story, and he finds it. And he informs Beowulf (and the reader) of his discovery, allowing us to learn from the first part of the poem in retrospect, and also to understand better the meaning of the second part as it unfolds.

This reading of Hrothgar's sermon clarifies some of the most troublesome aspects of the poem's moral vision. For example, stu- dents of the poem ask how the poet can repeatedly describe Hrothgar as a good and wise king, while he is so incapable of dealing with the monsters. We can see from his own explanation, however, that being a good king, who has secured peace and plenty for his people, is very much to the point. As Job learned, evil in the world besets both the good and the bad. Why this is so is one of Christianity's great themes:

As for the good things of this life, and its ills, God has willed that these should be common to both the righteous and the wicked; that we might not too eagerly covet the things which wicked men are seen equally to enjoy, nor shrink with an unseemly fear from the ills which good men suffer.... For the good man is neither uplifted by the good things of time, nor broken by its ills.

(City of God, I. viii)

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Hrothgar is not exactly being punished by Grendel or by God- any more than the good Christian women of Rome were being punished with rape and murder by the Goths; I would rather say that he is being taught. Augustine and Hrothgar are wise be- cause they can understand such things and learn from them.

A second question which we can now answer concerns those passages in which Hrothgar and the poet openly acknowledge that God could stop Grendel's crimes if He wanted to. "God eape maeg / pone dolsceafan daeda getwaefan (God could easily sepa- rate our stupid enemy from his sins)," laments Hrothgar early in the poem (11. 478-79); and as Beowulf and his men wait for the monster, the poet says "paet waes yldum cup, / paet hie ne moste, pa Metod nolde, / se synscaepa under sceada bregdan (It was well known to men that the evil attacker could not drag them off into the darkness unless the Lord so wished it)" (11. 705-07). Such details, which often strike students of the poem as inconsistencies, should not strike us so.

A third question which we can now answer concerns the struc- ture of Hrothgar's sermon itself. What is the relation between

Hrothgar's prophecy of Beowulf's death and his analysis of his own plight? The connection should be clear: the inability of the

good king to deal with the monsters is not mysterious; he is an old man, and the weakness which accompanies his approaching death, and which makes him incapable of defending his people against Grendel, is itself the significance of the story and proof of what he teaches Beowulf about the transience of the world. He is saying, in effect, "Your power will fade, you will die; my power faded, as Grendel made clear, and I am about to die."

After the sermon, Hrothgar weeps for Beowulf's departure, and has a shuddering premonition of his own death. The appro- priateness of the lessons Beowulf has learned becomes apparent within only a few lines: Beowulf returns to Geatland, becomes king, and like Hrothgar reigns successfully for fifty years; and then he too suffers a sudden reversal-from a dragon which seems to me

emblematic of those very truths which Hrothgar has been hammer-

ing home, that death and decay are inevitable, and even the great successes of a seemingly secure nation are necessarily impermanent. The "Lay of the Last Survivor" eloquently attaches these themes

to the gold-hoard and its guardian. And the older and wiser

Beowulf, as I read the poem's conclusion, faces this inevitable

reversal with a strength and piety which demonstrate how much

he has benefited from Hrothgar's hard-earned wisdom. And Beo-

wulf's wisdom is in knowing that he is old, and that his life is

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drawing to its inevitable conclusion. He sits alone by the sea before the last battle.

Then the battle-hard king, the gold-friend of the Geats, sat on the headland, and bade farewell to his hearth-retainers. His spirit was sad, restless and bound for death.'5 That fate was very near which had to come to the old man and seek the treasure of his soul, and sunder apart the life from the body; no longer would the life of the prince be clothed in flesh. (11. 2417-24)

Death and transience are as inevitable for Beowulf as they were for Hrothgar before him.

What I have tried to develop here is a method for discerning the moral significance of our tale. I have focused on certain symbols -the gold-hoard, the magic sword, the monsters-which the poet himself has explicated for us. We expect such explication from early medieval Christian writers, who very seldom leave the mean- ing of symbolic narratives unexplained-for that would be bad doctrine. The doctrine of our poem, as it turns out, is not exactly novel; but of course early Christian literature is not noted for its novel themes. Rather, the uniqueness of the poem and its great- ness lie in its expression and its structure, in which the poet reveals his meanings, much as God does in history, in an intricately balanced web of prophecies, images, and reflections, which suggest, interpret, and re-interpret the significance of Beowulf's adventures as we move through the poem.

I might point out in conclusion that each of us, without ex- ception, and according to the same unchanging necessity which our poem explores, we too will also one day soon come face-to- face with sickness or the sword, or horrible old age, the monster or the dragon; that is, after all, the wonsceaft of men, our nydwracu, our grim geosceaft. The delicacy of all our etymologizing and the subtlety of our criticism only bring us closer to the unavoidable and awesome realization. And it is in this truth that the power lies which the poem wields over those who have listened closely to what it says.

Fordham University

NOTES

'All translations from Old English are my own. Passages from the City of God are quoted from the translation by Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950).

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2"Draca sceal on ilaewe, / frod, fraetwum wlanc." The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliott Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. VI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 56.

3City of God. XV. v. The struggle between the brothers is that between the two Cities, and represents the struggle within the individual caused by the desires of the flesh; and according to this moral significance the story is also understood as a figure for the founding of Rome after the murder of Remus. "Unde mirandum non est quod tanto post in ea civitate condenda quae fuerat huius terrenae civitatis, de qua loquimur, caput futura et tam multis gentibus regnatura huic primo exemplo et, ut Graeci appellant, apXETv-rW quaedaln sui generis imago respondit."

4The Exeter Book, ed. George Krapp and Elliott Dobbie, ASPR vol. III (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936), p. 163.

5Heliand, 1. 2243; cf. Beowulf, 1. 1132. 6See Appendix. 7"Selfsceaft in Genesis B," Anglia 83 (1965), 154-71. 8Thomas 0. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft in Early

England (London, 1864-66), vol. II, p. 247. 9Fact and Lore about Old English Words (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,

1954), p. 187. lOAelfric's Lives of the Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS no. 94 (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1890), "St. Mary of Egypt," 1. 404, p. 28. llAndreas and The Fates of the Apostles, ed. Kenneth R. Brooks (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 126. 12Minor Poems, p. 28. 13Ibid., p. 155. 14See Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain (New

York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966). isThere is some dispute over the meaning of waelfus. The latest contribution

is by G. N. Garmonsway, "Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes," Franciplegius (New York: N.Y.N. Press, 1965), 144, who dismisses the common rendering "ready for death," and argues for "its natural meaning 'eager for slaughter.' " Both

interpretations seem too strong for me. I have suggested "bound for death," which finesses the question of Beowulf's knowledge or intent. Actually, wael means "carnage," and never as a synecdoche for battle or death. And fus in

compounds always refers to the direction of motion, not eagerness or readiness; moreover, fus as a compound element is almost always associated with death, in words like bealofus ("hastening to woe," referring to death in Rhyming Poem

50), ellorfus ("departing," referring to death in Genesis 1609, Guthlac 1027, and Andreas 188), grundfus ("bound for Hell," Vainglory 49), hellfus, hinfus (of Grendel escaping, dying), and utfus (of the funeral ship); and even more

directly in the compound fusleod (death-song). We might note also that fus is used by itself to mean "mortal," "dying," or "ready to die," as in Andreas 1664, Guthlac 1157 and 1228, The Order of the World 1, and especially Beowulf 1241, "fus ond faege." A familiarity with the various poetical uses of fus, then, leads me to the reading of waelfus I have suggested: Beowulf, whether he knows it or not (and I think he does), is about to become a corpse.

Appendix: wan/wann

Whether the won in wonsceaft means "lacking" or "dark" is not crucial to the above arguments, but the problem which the word presents is funda- mental to Old English word studies and is worth outlining. The word wan

represents a concept which is not reflected in a single Modern English word; without opening the Pandora's box of linguistic relativism, we can at least

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say that in certain areas such as color our modern categories are slightly different than those drawn by Old English words such as this one. Old English color words have been a perennial problem for scholars; the latest word on the subject is by Nigel F. Barley, "Old English Colour Classification: Where Do Matters Stand?" (ASE 3 [1974], 15-28).

Although, as Barley points out, wan has always been treated as one of three "problem words" among colors, he devotes only a paragraph to it, concluding that "it is applied to things negatively specified for hue, dark things which are glossy to the point of having highlights ripling across their surfaces." He also notes that the word "is homonymous with wan- expressing deprivation or negation," mistakenly implying by his hyphen that wan in this sense is used only as a prefix. In fact, wan is found by itself as a noun (meaning "want" or "lack") and as an adjective ("wanting," "absent," "lacking," "less"). Barley also fails to draw the obvious conclusion from these facts: that the "color" word wan (which though homonymous with these other meanings has always been curiously distinguished by scholars as a separate word and spelled wann) is actually the same word which means want or absence, when applied to the color categories of hue, brightness, and saturation. Possible meanings include a lack of hue (a colorlessness which may range from black through gray to white), a lack of brightness (dark), and a lack of saturation (pale). In the Old English color system these three lacks taken together add up to the sense "dark and dingy"-and not necessarily glossy with highlights, unless that would describe clouds, shadows, and night, which are the most common ap- plications of the word. The word need not apply to all three categories of color discrimination at the same time; in Modern English "wan" survives only in reference to saturation, meaning pale; we see it used in the same sense in Beowulf, 1.3115, when applied to fire.

If this wide range of meanings does not seem to add up to a coherent concept, we can grasp its unity immediately by referring to a conventional color-solid, used by scientists and technicians who need to refer to colors with precision. Wan neatly discriminates the whole range of colors near the core of the color-solid, an area including black, gray, and white, as well as pale and dusky shades of all the other colors (that wan can be seen as a quality of different hues is apparent from the separate words brunwann and wanhaewe). In Modern English the word has become confined to the upper portion of the same area of the color-solid. Barley's difficulty with wan stems from the structuralist's drive to reduce complex (in this case three-dimensional) conceptual structures to "simply binary" ones.

This explanation of wan may seem over-complex and unlikely as a description of a usable color-word; but it could be shown with the aid of our solor-solid that the average person could master the distinction between wan and not- wan in a matter of seconds (and might even find the new word useful from time to time).

As for the meaning of won in wonsceaft, could it be interpreted as "dark and dingy" rather than as the privative prefix? In the latter case, the word would mean something like "un-creation," which might be vaguely parallel with the Latin de-structio. On the other hand, we could read it as "dark fate," as I have above. The difference between these two readings is less than it might seem, however, since the two meanings of sceaft (creation and fate) actually reflect a unified concept of the destiny inherent in the nature of things, and regarding the two meanings of wan, darkness is actually an instance of absence, as I have just pointed out.

More interestingly, in the vast Christian literature concerned with the subject of evil in the world, darkness is the most common analogy for the nature of evil. Evil is not defined as real in itself, but as the absence of good, just as darkness

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is the absence of light (e.g. City of God XII. vii). Evil has always been asso- ciated with darkness, of course, but since Christ is the lux mundi, the simile is more than superficially expressive of Christian moral truths. "When spirits fall, their darkness is revealed, for they are stripped of the garment of your light" (Confessions XIII. viii). Privation, which is the fundamental meaning of wan, is the essential quality of both evil and darkness; the two meanings of wan, then, are perfectly suited for the expression of darkness as a spiritual metaphor.

The association of wan with evil is borne out throughout Beowulf: Grendel represents the wonsceaft wera, and is also described as wonsaeli (1. 105), and he lis characterized by wonhyd (1.434); the night of his attack is wan under wolcnuml (1. 651), he creeps about in the wanre niht (1.702); the tossing waves of his mere are wan (1. 1374); after Beowulf's death the wonna hrefn is fus aefter faegum. (11. 3024-25), and the destroying flames of Beowulf's pyre are also wonna (1. 3115).

The occurrences of wonsceaft in Beowulf and wanskefti in the Heliand both allow for the whole range of meanings I have elaborated here; in both cases, the "dark fate" of men is precisely their destructio because of evil. So we are not led to a necessary choice between the meanings of wan in this compound. My interest in raising the issue has been only to point out an example of what I suspect is a widespread problem in the definition of Old English words-

homonyms which have been treated as distinct words, rather than parts of of single concept.