Beowulf as a Document of the Teutonic Age

Beowulf as a Document of the Teutonic Age

Sibaprasad Dutta

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Among the many features that give Beowulf, the first English epic, an important place in English literature is the picture of the heroic age that it portrays. Although Beowulf was not written as a chronicle of the age but as a poem, it contains enough elements that give us an idea of the heroic age. The age that is portrayed is the Teutonic age for the nation had not yet acquired its English character and had strong links with the roots. As we all know, Beowulf is not an English epic though written in English, for the theme was Scandinavian. Stoppford A. Brooke points out that behind the wars and tribal wanderings, we watch in this poem the steady, contentious life of home, the passions and thoughts of men, the way they talked and moved and sang and drank and lived and loved. The most noticeable trait of the people of the age, embodied in the character of Beowulf, is that the people were mighty, though barbarous, and strikingly unselfish.

Being a heroic poem, Beowulf is supposed to contain in the main elements that are appropriately heroic. This is quite natural as literature, of whatever type it may be, is likely to bear reflections of life, and therefore of the time. The first element that strikes us is that the age was barbarous. English nation had not yet reached the level of refinement for the immigrants who were mostly tribal lived in constant confrontation with the hostile forces of nature, particularly the sea. Yet very remarkably, they loved the sea and often tried to master the might waters, displaying amazing dauntlessness. Beowulf’s fight with the sea-monster, Grendel, and thereafter his mother reflects savage vigour and physical prowess. Beowulf who lived in the house of his uncle, Hygelac, the king of the Geats was ‘a man of immense strength and courage, and a mighty swimmer. He had developed his powers fighting the “knickers”, whales, walruses and seals, in the icebound northern ocean. When he heard of Grendel’s tyranny in the great hall of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes that continued for long twelve years he decided to face the sea-monster in order to save the Danes who were his father’s friends. King Hrothgar and his warriors had done their best to kill Grendel, but all their attempts had failed. With fourteen companions Beowulf crossed the sea, and we get ‘an excellent bit of ocean poetry’ in this section of the poem. (II.210-224). In fact, the ocean was a deep influence upon the lives of the people of the age as they lived by the sea and depended on the sea for their living. The race was powerful, big and blond, and they hunted, fought and sailed, and drank and feasted at the end of the day. The sea was fierce with its fogs and storms, yet these big, fearless, childish men loved the sea and answered its call. A few lines of The Seafarer would help us:
No delight has he in the world,

Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing.

A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.
This love of ocean is also reflected in Beowulf which has 15 names for the sea, from the holm, that is, the horizon sea, the “upmounding,” to the “brim” which is the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach. And the figures to describe it – “the swan road, the whale path, the heaving battle plain” – are almost as numerous. In all their poetry there is a magnificent sense of lordship over the wild sea even in its hour of tempest and fury:
Often it befalls us, on the ocean’s highways,

In the boats our boatmen, when the storm is roaring,

Leap the billows over, on our stallions of the foam. (Andreas)
We also get a vivid idea of the hospitality of a brave people in the poet’s description of Beowulf’s
meeting with King Hrothgar and Queen Wealtheow, and of the joy and feasting and story-telling in Heorot. The picture of Wealtheow passing the mead cup to the warriors with her own hand is a noble one, and plainly indicates the reverence paid by these strong men to their wives and mothers. The physical prowess is depicted as Beowulf prepares to confront the sea-monster bare- handed. As Grendel, after finishing a sleeping warrior and swallowing him up, attempts to kill Beowulf, he finds a body as hard as steel. The fight in its course throws light upon the décor of the hall , particularly its golden benches. After a terrible fight, Grendel receives a fatal wound in his body and plunges into the sea to die. The next day, there is singing, story-telling and speech-making to celebrate Beowulf’s victory. This indicates how the people loved the heroes and sang in praise of their valour.
In the same night, Grendel’s mother attacks Beowulf, and takes him into a cave under the sea where she is joined by other monsters. But Beowulf catches hold of a mighty, magic sword and deals a crashing blow on the person (body) of the monster. Beowulf wins the fight. The cave is full of treasures; but Beowulf pays no heed to them. He severs the head of dead Grendel and shores up. In the second part of the poem, Beowulf, now old, takes upon himself another challenge to face the monster, but he now succumbs to the injuries. Beowulf dies but he dies a hero who little cares for his age and takes upon himself the cause of fellowmen living far away from the country of the Geats. The end of the poem is magnificent, particularly, the funereal. The whole secret of Beowulf’s mighty life is summed up in the last line, “Ever yearning for his people’s praise.”

For him then the people of the Geats made ready

a splendid funeral pyre on the earth,

hung around with helmets, with battle-shields,

with shining corslets, as he requested :

then they laid in the midst of it the illustrious prince,

the weeping warriors, the beloved lord:

then the warriors began to kindle on the cliff

the greatest of funeral fires: the wood-smoke rose up

dark above the fire, the roaring flames,

surrounded by lamentation – the tumult of the winds subsided –

till it had completely crushed the body,

hot in his breast. Sad in mind

they complained of the sorrow of their hearts,

the death of their liege lord. (3137-49)
The ending of the poem is magnificent. It glorifies the unselfish heroism of Beowulf, the great prototype of King Alfred; the generous grief of his people who ignore gold and jewels in the thought of a far greater treasure that have lost; the memorial mound on the low cliff, which would cause every returning mariner to steer a straight course to the harbour in the remembrance of his dead hero; and all this is dealt with in pure poetry with noble lines. “Search literatures of the whole world,” writes Long, “and you will find no other such picture of a brave man’s death.” The most important thing about Beowulf is that while oriental peoples built monuments to perpetuate the memory of their dead heroes, the Anglo-Saxon people commemorated the heroes in poems “which should live and stir men’s souls long after monuments of brick and stone have crumbled away.”
The court life is painted in Beowulf in great detail. The court was a big hall in which the king sat on a high throne at the east end of the hall. The king’s seat was considered hallowed, and no monster could afford to touch it. This is evident in Grendel’s inability to touch the throne of Hrothgar. Commoners or strangers were not allowed to enter the hall without the consent of the king, and although Beowulf had come on a mission to defend Hrothgar and his people, he had to wait outside the hall. The royal women have their seats behind the seat of the king, and so the queen of Hrothgar, his daughters and other women sat behind Hrothgar. The seat of the court jester, the ancestor of Feste or Touchstone, was at the foot of the king. This is evident in the seating arrangement of Hunferth, the jester of Hrothgar. The sons of the king, the thanes, sat on the benches arranged at right angles to the throne. When the courtiers drank in joy, the queen filled the goblets. When Beowulf succeeded in killing Grendel, a great feast was arranged by Hrothgar the day following the night. To enhance the mood of mirth and jollity, the minstrel sang the saga of Finn, and of Hengest and Hnaef and Hilderbuth, sons of the king. The song ended, started the drinking session. While the servants served wine to the guests, Queen Weatheow filled the chalice of her husband.
To reward the heroes for acts of bravery was a fashion of the age. Hrothgar in recognition and appreciation of Beowulf’s act of heroism gave him a “golden ensign, a helm, a coat of mail and the great treasure of a sword.” The Queen gifted Beowulf with a ‘byrnie and armlets and a jewelled collar, well-known all over the north, as fine as the Brosing’s collar that Hama wore, wrested from Eoromanric. (S. A. Brooke)
Although the heroes were unselfish in their attempt to perform deeds of valour, they had weakness for fame and often boasted of their heroism. When Hrothgar’s wife, Queen Wealtheow, offers the cup of wine to Beowulf after his glorious victory over Grendel, Beowulf says:
“this was my thought when I shipped on the sea; sat down in my boat with a band of my men, that I would fully work out the will of your folk, or fall on the field of slaughter, fast in the grips of the foe. Earl-like will I fulfil the daring deed, or abide my end-day in this mead-hall.”
Again, before setting out to the cave of Grendel’s mother under the sea, Beowulf vaunts before Hrothgar:

“Not in the earth’s breast, nor deep in the sea, nor in the mountain holt, nor in the abyss of ocean, go where she will, shall Grendel’s kin escape from me.”

Loyalty to the lord was an admirable virtue of the king’s men. When Grendel did not come out of the sea for a long time, Hrothgar’s men fled from the shore of the sea in despair. But Beowulf’s men stayed put, never leaving the place. Some of them had fled to the nearby wood when the dragon charged Beowulf who finally died; but Beowulf’s most ardent follower, Wiglaf, castigated them for their cowardice.
The women were treated with dignity and honour, and after the death of the kings, they acted as the regents if the kings’ sons were young. “Women were also peace-weavers,” and warring tribes often built up rapprochement through marriage ties. To achieve such an end, Hrothgar married his daughter to Ingled, the son of Froda. Women belonging to the families of peasants were hard-working. They sat spinning at their doors, or moved hither and thither, carrying water or attending to the cattle.” - S. A. Brooke.
Another feature of Teutonic life that is discernible in Beowulf is its fatalism. The

people knew that they were play-dolls in the hands of fate, and if there was anything that was sure and certain was that man was born to die. But this fatalism did not turn the people cowardly, but turned them tremendously bold and daring. Knowing that death is sure and certain, they fought bravely against the hostile forces, natural and human. This spirit is reflected Beowulf’s words spoken to Hrothgar after the latter’s description of death of Aesche in the hands of Grendel’s mother. When Hrothgar seething in desperation tells Beowulf: “Seek her if you dare,” Beowulf accepts the challenge and utters the wise words: “All of us die sooner or later, so let him who can gain honour before death.”

Again, Beowulf not only portrays the halls, the warriors, their mighty fight with monsters and their fascination for the sea, the inner life of the people also finds adequate expression in the earliest English epic. The striking feature of this inner life is dauntless courage and unselfish bravery that inspires the heroes to stake their lives for the good of the defenceless people. This impulse makes Beowulf cross over to the Danish kingdom and fight out the sea monsters and even court death in his misadventure in the old age. The early sea kings marvellously embodied savagery and sentiment, rough living and deep feeling, splendid courage and the deep melancholy of men who know their limitations and have faced the “unanswered problem of death”. They were not simply fearless freebooters who harried every coast in their war galleys. If that were all, they would have no more history than the Barbary pirates, of whom the same thing could be said. The people evidently were men of strong emotions. In all their fighting the love of an untarnished glory was uppermost; and under the warrior’s savage exterior was hidden a great love of home and homely virtues, and a reverence for a woman to whom he would presently return in triumph. So when the wolf hunt was over, or the desperate fight was won, these mighty men would gather in the banquet hall, and lay their weapons aside where the open fire would flash upon them, and there listen to the songs of Scop and Gleeman – men could put into adequate words the emotions and aspirations that all men feel but that only a few can ever express:
Music and son where the heroes sat –

The glee-wood rang, a song uprose

When Hrothgar’s scop gave the hall good cheer. (Beowulf)
The life of the Anglo-Saxon people was indeed great, and this great life finds expression in all their literary works. Briefly, it is summed up in five great principles, - their love of personal freedom, their responsiveness to nature, their religion, their reverence for the womanhood, and their struggle for glory as a ruling motive in every noble life.
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