Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien's Beowulf, Part 1
(avg. read time: 4–8 mins.)
Today marks the first of what I hope will be many entries on Tolkien Tuesdays where I write biblical and theological commentaries of Tolkien’s work. Many have undertaken the task of discerning Christian and biblical elements in Tolkien’s fiction, and I will review some of those efforts in due time. But my overall project is broader, as I want to explore these elements in Tolkien’s work as a whole.
Here, I will begin with Tolkien’s translation and commentary of a work near and dear to his heart: Beowulf.1 The translation was completed all the way back in 1926, well before Tolkien would become famous, even in the realm of Beowulf studies. Indeed, this was a full decade before his landmark lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” For the purposes of this commentary, I will only be picking out those elements of his translation and commentary in which Tolkien takes direct note of Christian and biblical elements, so as to illuminate his awareness of the same. As such, this is a commentary on his commentary, not a commentary on Beowulf itself that can otherwise be separated from Tolkien’s work. Such an exploration of Beowulf is surely interesting in its own right, but it is not what I am doing here.
We thus begin with the exordium of the poem, which makes reference to a Beow/Beowulf who is distinct from the titular hero. He is said to be sent by God for the comfort of the people. God is called in this context Liffréa, “Lord of Life.” This designation signifies both that God is Creator and that he is sovereign over life, being its source. It is to such a framework that the poet will again appeal when beginning the story proper, describing how the people of Hrothgar’s hall would recount the Almighty’s work of creation in all its glory, which is immediately contrasting with the hellish creature who attacks them for reveling with such stories. This title, beyond simply being an honorific, also explains how and why God acts in this way to provide for this people. This Christian explanation for why Beow arose as the ruler the people needed is also reliant on the assumption that history is shaped by God’s providence, always operating, but most notable when great events happen or great people emerge. Such is a theme that would have resounding significance in Tolkien’s own storytelling.
The next hint of Christian framing that is perhaps even more illuminating is when Scyld, Beow’s father, is described as undergoing a ship-burial, by which he is “passed into the / keeping of the Lord” (ll. 21–22). At this point, Tolkien says, “The author of Beowulf was not a heathen, but he wrote in a time when the pagan past was still very near: so near that not only some facts were remembered, but moods and motives also.”2 On the latter point, he notes that the ritual of the ship-burial was not so much a way of conveying some definite doctrine of what awaited the one so buried, but a ritual exercised in a mood of doubt and darkness.3 This mood overlays the world in which Beowulf is set, as it also overlaid the larger Norse world, and this point is best conveyed by the presence and action of the various monsters featured in the story. It is against this backdrop that the heroic spirit in Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and older Norse tales is embodied. Now that the light of Christ has come to this land, it has cast a new light on this doubt and darkness, as well as on the heroic spirit that fought against it.
That new framework also manifests in the description of Grendel as a “fiend [enemy] of hell” (féond on helle). This description of a monster that is mortal, physically present in Denmark, and not yet a damned spirit is thought to represent some kind of confusion or ambiguity on the part of how best for the Christian poet to describe him: “Whether féond on helle is due to a kind of half-theological notion that one of the accursed things, of misshapen human form, being damned carried their hell ever with them in their hearts and spirit – or whether it is due to taking over a ‘Christian’ phrase carelessly (féond on helle just = ‘fiend, devil’) – is difficult to decide.”4
Even more remarkably demonstrative of this framework is the connection of Grendel to the “race of Cain” that the poet makes in three sentences prior to describing Grendel’s first attack. In Tolkien’s day, this was often thought to be a late Christian interpolation to an originally non-Christian writing of Beowulf. But Tolkien, in line with his famous article, thinks this is a genuine part of the poem and it fits with the author’s characteristic interest in the OT. After all, when dealing with pre-Christian stories, many Christian authors found more direct points of contact between these stories and the OT as similarly setting the stage for the revelation of Christ and an easier entry point into the larger realm of biblical theology.
Here, the poet had to address two aspects of pre-Christian stories passed down to him: 1) How does one account for the monsters? 2) What does one make of heathen heroism? In response to the first, the poet finds a connecting link between the monsters of these pre-Christian stories and Christian spiritual warfare by appeal to the “race of Cain” as an explanation of where monsters came from. In particular, as early Christian authors also found useful for explaining the ancient myths of different cultures, he found useful the references to the Nephilim/heroes of old that were produced from the “sons of God” reproducing with the “daughters of men” in Gen 6:1–4. In response to the second, the poet could likewise connect these pre-Christian heroes with the redeemed of Christ by analogy to the Israelite heroes of the OT. As Tolkien says in relation to these Israelites, “The redemption of Christ might work backwards. But in the Harrowing of Hell why should not (say) Hrothgar be among the rescued too? For the people of Israel could also fall away in time of trial to the worship of idols and false gods.”5
Indeed, as Tolkien writes about at some length, the poet is conflicted about the status of theological knowledge of the people he writes about.6 On the one hand, he wishes to portray them as people with a recognition of the Almighty God prior to the arrival of the gospel, although they are still given to idolatry. On the other hand, the poem still states of them that they did not know God (indeed, they were wholly ignorant of him). Tolkien posits that the chief passage that conflicts with the more pervasive first idea—ll. 135–150 in his translation—must have been a later alteration, since the Beowulf-poet is otherwise consistent and this notion of the “good pagan” seems too central.
The poet also makes the connection between Grendel and “sorcerers of hell” (helrúnan, those who engage in the secret arts [rún] associated with the hidden world of the dark realm of the dead [hell]). Tolkien also notes the example of the “Weird Sisters” of Macbeth. As he further explains,
The witch or ‘necromancer’ was like Grendel an outcast, and again like Grendel balanced in the imagination between the human and the monstrous or demonic. Though veritable human beings could go in for dark and abominable lore (and have secret associations), there was an ill-defined border between such folk with their acquired powers, and actual demonic beings: ‘weird sisters’. So Wulfstan couples wiccan (witches) and waelcyrian (valkyries).7
More fascinating from the angle of interpreting older theology is the note in l. 367 of Tolkien’s translation that “Fate goeth ever as she must.” “Fate” translates the key Old English term wyrd. Tolkien says of this and other passages referring to it that it is difficult to determine “(1) how far it was more than grammatically ‘personalized’; (2) what precisely it ‘means’, that is, how far it had, or retained, for speakers or hearers any conscious ingredient of what we may call mytho-philosophical reflection in evidently well-known formulae.”8 For such considerations, Tolkien notes important factors which are also crucial to keep in mind in my own field. First, it is important to pay attention to who is speaking when the term is used. Is it Beowulf, Hrothgar, another character, or the poet? Second, particularly with such grand, abstract forces, there is a tendency for such expressions to become formulaic without the original theological content (an example of which he gives as “fortune favors the brave”).9 In this way, such an expression is equivalent to che sará sará (“what will be, will be”).
At the same time, he notes that there are contexts in which it is quite deliberately personalized/personified. That is, there are cases where a specific figure or specific power is invoked when referring to wyrd. This power may be, “subordinate to, or even equated with Metod or other words commonly used as synonyms of God, even with God.”10
In any case, in that the context is Beowulf offering his services as a warrior to vanquish Grendel, and in that the poet presents this story with a Christian frame, this statement is understood as a belief that divine providence will direct the battle with Grendel aright. But he does not state too forthrightly what that direction is, lest he appear presumptuous before what is to him the most mysterious of wills. In turn, Hrothgar notes in response that what Grendel has done has happened only by God’s allowance, as God could well hinder him. This again upholds the belief that the battle is ultimately in the hands of God and God gives victory to whom he wills.
Such, then, are the main biblical and theological elements that Tolkien has noted in Beowulf so far as the framing of the monster battles to come is concerned.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Mariner, 2015).
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 152.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid., 160–61.
Ibid., 169–86.
Ibid., 168.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid.
Ibid., 245.