Beowulf's Fate And The Dragon As Mother Earth

An excerpt from, “God, Fate, and the Hero of “Beowulf”" By Mary C. Wilson Tietjen, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Apr., 1975), pg. 159-61:

Since F. A. Blackburn argued in 1897 that Beowulf was originally a pagan poem to which Christian elements were added by a later hand, critics have attempted in various ways to prove him wrong and have concluded that the poem exhibits a unified Christian character. Friedrich Klaeber, the first major critic to examine sympathetically the Christian aspects of Beowulf, argues convincingly for the now generally accepted view that “the Christian elements are almost without exception so deeply ingrained in the very fabric of the poem that they cannot be explained away as the work of a reviser or later interpolator.” The almost universal acknowledgment of Klaeber’s quite legitimate point that Beowulf is the product of a single Christian poet has unfortunately, in recent years, opened the door to a host of overzealous critics who have proceeded to throw out the baby with the bathwater. These critics assume that if Christian sentiment is an integral part of the poem, Beowulf is doubtless almost exclusively Christian in tone and attitude. J. R. R. Tolkien’s insistence that the characters of Beowulf are conceived as “living in a noble but heathen past,” and the observation of R. W. Chambers that the poet shows us “the virtues of the heathen ‘Heroic Age’ . . . tempered by the gentleness of the new belief,” have both been largely forgotten in attempts to explain away the poem’s paganism, just as Blackburn and his followers had earlier attempted to explain away its Christianity.

Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s comment on the content of the poem is typical: “Although much of the pagan Germanic spirit, together with motifs and situations descending from pagan times, remains discernible, the refashioning of ancient pagan stuff has been so complete that the extant poem is essentially a Christian epic.” Contributions to the view that Beowulf is predominantly Christian in attitude take many different forms: in recent years, the poem has been interpreted as an allegory of salvation, as a Christian allegory on the victory of concordia over discordia, as a didactic poem about the Christian sin of pride, and as a narrative many of whose events are parallel with those of the life of Christ and whose hero is a type of Christ. Moreover, the pagan concept of wyrd has been pressed into the service of Christianity by Brodeur and Marie Padgett Hamilton, who argue that wyrd in Beowulf is subject to the dictates of God and therefore cannot be considered as an entirely pagan concept. Pains have also been taken, particularly by Brodeur, to strip Beowulf himself of any motives that smack of the pagan heroic ideals of personal prowess and earthly lof. Tolkien’s argument that “Beowulf s real trust was in his own might” is contested by Brodeur, who goes to great lengths to prove that Beowulf is just as pious as Hrothgar. Brodeur’s arguments for Beowulf s piety are legitimate enough, but his implication is that faith in one’s own strength is to be frowned upon. Margaret E. Goldsmith makes Brodeurs implication explicit by connecting the heroic ideal with the Christian sin of pride, and argues that Beowulf dies because he becomes proud of his strength and earthly fame, and refuses to acknowledge God’s grace and guidance.

These critical discussions that undertake to make the poem’s pagan elements compatible with Christian thought (citing, as they do, an abundance of references to Boethius, the Church Fathers, the liturgy, and the Seven Deadly Sins) impoverish our approach to Beowulf in that we are reduced to dealing with a poem of considerable complexity in terms of what amounts to a narrow Christian didacticism. But despite such efforts to ignore, explain away, or underplay the pagan elements of the poem, a careful consideration of the text reveals that the story told by the Beowulf-poet is undeniably both Christian and pagan in attitude and tone: the society presented to us is one in which the heroic ideal has remained an ideal—although the Christian concept of God’s grace is also present—and in which men are subject both to the Christian God and to the pagan power of wyrd. The ideals, divine and human, of paganism and Christianity exist side by side in Beowulf. The poem contains concepts both of a blind and whimsical force whose dealings with men are unrelated to their merit, and of a benevolent Christian deity who affords grace and guidance to the worthy. Similarly, Beowulf himself is presented both as the pagan heroic ideal of the mighty and renowned warrior and as the Christian ideal of the virtuous hero who rightly attributes his special powers, and the deeds arising from those powers, to the grace of God. I propose, in the paragraphs that follow, to discuss the co-existence of these Christian and pagan concepts in Beowulf, and to show how the poem effectively accommodates both.

An excerpt from, “Words With Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature” By Northrop Frye, Viking, 1990, pg. 253-55:

The cycle of the order of nature, the cycle of descent and return, death and new life, the passing from winter to spring and from darkness to dawn, dominates all the “dying god” mythology that is so central in so many cultures. Some scholars think that the cycle of the moon, with its crucial three-day period of waning, disappearance and return, provided the metaphorical kernel of the three-day ritual in which a god associated with vegetation is usually put to death on the first day, is buried, disappears and his absence mourned on the second, and rises again on the third. For agricultural people the continuity of this cycle is what is important. Proserpine is kidnapped by Pluto and taken off to the lower world; the world turns barren as her mother mourns and searches for her; eventually she is released, and her re-appearance (the rising of the corn-maiden or anodos of Kore) is an occasion of great rejoicing. But she must go back to the lower world again, otherwise there will be nothing to eat next year.

In the Old Testament deluge the whole world is sunk under water, and when it emerges an agricultural cycle of seed-time and harvest is established, with God himself guaranteeing its permanence. The main agricultural products of Biblical countries are grain and wine, and Noah celebrates the occasion by discovering wine, with predictable results. There must have been however an agricultural cycle before this, as Cain’s offering of first-fruits shows. The “cursing of the ground” between Cain’s murder of Abel and the end of the deluge (Genesis 4:12 and 8:21) perhaps points to an earlier and more hazardous food-planting economy. The promises of regularity in the annual cycle, however, do not exclude frequent famines, including the one that drives Israel into Egypt at the end of the Book of Genesis.

We suggested that the buried treasures of popular romance may be metaphors for other motives for descent, notably oracular wisdom, or a source of fertility. In Ruskin’s tale “The King of the Golden River,” the rumor of gold lures two wicked brothers to their death, while for the good brother the real gold turns out to be a fertilizing river. Buried fertility appears in some Celtic myths of cauldrons of unlimited food and drink, which some scholars have tried to connect with the Grail romances: in any case the cornucopia is an ascending spiral of life, as the maelstrom or whirlpool of death is the opposite. This theme of the inexhaustible vessel of food or drink appears in parody in the Holy Bottle in Rabelais, where the word “oracle” links the descent, also of course in parody, to that of descent for wisdom or secret knowledge.

At the lowest point of descent there is likely to be a crucial turn from death to new life, when a threatening monster is killed or a similar crisis passed. The sunrise and the release of the life-giving waters of rain in the spring are often connected with victories over sinister powers that try to prolong darkness or winter, like those who “curse the day” in Job 3:8. There is a beautiful if slightly grotesque example in Beowulf, where the hero goes under water to kill Grendel’s mother and the poison from her blood melts his sword, an event at once associated with the image of icicles melting at the coming of spring. The descent to obtain renewed fertility is not the theme of the story, but the imagery is closely related.

The rhythm of the natural cycle has provided a great many mythical analogies to human life. We have cycles in history, of empires rising, declining and being succeeded by new empires; we have cycles of authoritarian regimes followed by revolutions, which are followed by a new form of authority; we have the cycles of conversion and similar reversals of movement in the individual psyche; we have images of the natural cycle acting on human beings, in the way that the awakening spring gets Chaucer’s pilgrims out on the road to Canterbury. The human cycles in history are much more irregular and unpredictable than the natural ones, though Yeats’s Vision draws what are alleged to be very precise ones from the phases of the moon.

An excerpt from, “A Companion To Beowulf” By Ruth Johnston Staver, Greenwood Press, 2005, pg. 151-53:

Tacitus states that the eastern Germanic tribes worshipped a goddess, Isis, with an image inside a ship. The goddess that they worshipped was not the Egyptian Isis, but rather an Earth Mother figure that other sources call Nerthus. This Earth goddess was probably mixed with Norse beliefs about Ing/Frey’s sister, Freya, goddess of love. The little we can tell about this worship suggests that its center was probably in the land of the Ingwines (the Danes). As Tacitus reports, there was a secret image of the goddess in a wagon (not a ship) drawn by two cows. The priest tended this wagon and allowed the cows to pull it where they wished. Where the wagon stopped, the goddess was said to be present, until the priest was ready to head the cows back to the secret lake where the image lived. After slaves washed down the wagon, they were drowned in the sacred lake. Human sacrifice was almost certainly a feature of earth worship. The bodies recovered from Danish bogs, having been ritually killed by strangling, could have been offered to the Earth Mother in a place where they knew the earth would draw the body down and out of sight, as it sank in the bog and “Nerthus” took her offering.

Even during Christian Anglo-Saxon times, there were rituals to heal a “sick field” that called on the “earth’s mother.” All through the Middle Ages, there were country customs of Harvest Queens and May Queens. As late as the 1800s, some country people of England still celebrated harvest time with a robed shock of wheat in a wagon. These customs are almost certainly festivals based on the old pagan festivals of earth worship, even if the country folk no longer believed in the pagan gods as such. It is likely, too, that in the minds of the everyday Anglo-Saxons, the customs honoring the Harvest Queen, or Nerthus/Freya, were more important than those honoring Woden or Thor.

Herbert (1994) suggests that one part of Beowulf that may directly be an expression of an old pagan myth. The poem opens with the death of Scyld, the son of Scef and the father of another Beowulf. There are a few independent accounts of this person who arrived in a boat. In these others, the baby who arrived in a boat was not Scyld, but Scef; and the son of Scyld was not Beowulf, but Beow. These different accounts must be based on some original story that is lost to us. It may be the story of Sheaf (of grain) who arrived as a gift from the gods, and, through his son Shield, gave the people Beow (barley). Perhaps this version reflects an old, even forgotten, myth. If the round Shield could represent the round sun, then the sun is needed to warm the sheaf of seeds to produce a crop of barley. Another reason to believe that the story shows us a pagan myth is that the later people of Denmark had no such story of their founding kings. The story is only found in English sources; the English may have known it as a myth associated with the country that they came from, the country of the Ingwines. There is no question, however, that a farming myth like this was far from the mind of the Beowulf poet. The confusion surrounding Scyld and his father, and the “error” in the name of Scyld’s son (Beowulf rather than Beow), reveal that the poet knew nothing more than the basic story of the family.

Supernatural creatures abounded in the pagan world view. It is clear that the pagan Anglo-Saxons believed in many fantastical creatures such as elves, giants, trolls, and all kinds of monsters. Their view of world history may have included the Norse scenario in which the old gods died after fighting a doomed battle. It certainly included the three Fates who governed history. We know only the North Germanic names for these “Three Sisters,” but it is clear that the Angles and Saxons must have used similar names. They were called, essentially, “Was,” “Being,” and “Shall Be”; or in Norse, “Wyrd,” “Verdandi,” and “Skuld.” There is no record of what the early English called two of the Fates, but “Wyrd” remains in the Old English language as the word for “Fate.”

The “Three Sisters” is a concept that is found all over the European world. By any names, they are the immortal sisters who control history. One is very old and represents the past that controls the conditions of the present. One is grown but not old and represents the present and the necessities of our everyday life. One is young but mysterious, perhaps with a covered face, and represents the unknown future that the others control. The Three Sisters are most often shown in the process of weaving cloth, an image of time. They occur in Greek and Roman literature, as well as in Macbeth and in the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty.” These Fates were always ageless and above the gods. Their decrees could not be escaped. Whatever stories the Anglo-Saxons knew about the Fates, we know that they used the name “Wyrd” to mean the inescapable decree of the day of one’s death.

The pagan Germanic tribes’ values, however, were based on heroic action. The other side of Wyrd is that since fate cannot be changed, it can usually be ignored. If a warrior is fated to die, then he will die, but if he is not fated to die, then courage will help him become famous and honored. They valued bold action, not passive acceptance. Bold action was often needed in defense of the greatest good, the king and his hall. Bold action, not passive acceptance, complemented the loyalty that they required at every level.

Loyalty, the highest Germanic value, also meant loyalty in a marriage. When princesses married kings they had never met, they remained faithful for life. Tactius described how the entire society banded together to persecute adultery, deeming it disloyalty of the worst kind. Tacitus admired this ethic, just as later English missionaries admired the same ethic in pagan Saxons (in modern Germany). Loyalty also meant the duty to vengeance if one’s kin or lord were slain. This duty was absolute and resulted in complex feuds in which each generation committed new murders to be revenged. Pagan Anglo-Saxon culture was not a safe place for mistakes.