Biblical and Theological Commentary on "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"
(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)
My last two Tolkien Tuesday posts provided biblical and theological commentary on Tolkien’s own commentary on Beowulf. As one might expect, much of what Tolkien wrote in that commentary anticipates what he would address in the essay that is the subject of today’s post: “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” It was first delivered as a lecture in 1936 at the British Academy and was published that same year in Proceedings of the British Academy. Before The Hobbit was published, this was how Tolkien made his name in the academy, for it had both immediate and lasting impact in studies of Beowulf.
In fact, there is an interesting parallel between Tolkien’s work and my own field of biblical studies. Tolkien’s work in Beowulf studies portended what some have called the “literary turn” in biblical studies. Tolkien said of Beowulf studies at the time:
It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem. It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges. This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think it profoundly untrue of that poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.1
At the time, both Beowulf and the Bible were studied with the tools of “historical criticism,” which generally meant speculating on the history, origins, background, and connections of the text through use of tools like textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, etymology, and so on, often turning the text into a series of layers redacted over the years by different generations each leaving their mark on the text. It also focused on making connections with figures known from outside the text. But in both cases, such approaches led to the text being disassembled into supposed constituent parts to analyze a hypothesis of what a text originally was or as some quarry for the concerns of contemporary historical questions, rather than analyzing the text as what it is.2 Tolkien responded—and later biblical scholars like Robert Alter responded—to this situation by refocusing on analyzing the literature as literature and using the tools of literary criticism. After all, as Tolkien says in a key statement, “The illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made Beowulf seem such an attractive quarry, is largely a product of art.”3 In this essay Tolkien focuses on analyzing Beowulf as the poem that it is—rather than as a distorted historical document that the scholar has to clear up—by focusing his analysis on the monsters and their function, who were often either neglected or regarded as ancillary in Beowulf scholarship to this point. But it is precisely the monsters and how they contribute to the themes of Beowulf that have given it its profundity and lasting legacy.
Although in much criticism today (I have noticed it especially in film criticism, but it is also present in literary criticism) appeals to themes or ideas are often insulations against negative critique, Tolkien makes the point in his argument that the theme of Beowulf exists in a magnificent harmony with its more functional aspects of structure, weighty words, well-wrought language, and so on, “For, in fact, if there were a real discrepancy between theme and style, that style would not be felt as beautiful but as incongruous or false. And that incongruity is present in some measure in all the long Old English poems, save one – Beowulf.”4
Previous judgments to the contrary emerged from “pondering a summarized plot of Beowulf, denuded of all that gives it particular force or individual life,”5 including the monsters. Of course, it is easy to criticize any story by reducing it to such a short summary, such as the common attempts to summarize a story in one sentence. Hence, I have never seen the value in such an exercise. The richness of Beowulf and of other great stories does not rest in what one thinks its ultimate boiled-down essence is. Each of the parts contribute to the whole:
For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. It is possible, I think, to be moved by the power of myth and yet to misunderstand the sensation, to ascribe it wholly to something else that is also present: to metrical art, style, or verbal skill. Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us – the proud we that includes all intelligent living people – in ogres and dragons; we then perceive this puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures.6
Now I realize that to this point this has not obviously been a biblical and theological commentary, but this has been necessary build-up to the point that Tolkien reaches in talking about the monsters, which will indeed intersect at multiple points with biblical and theological considerations. It likewise shows how this essay and its concerns intersects with the history of biblical scholarship and the all-too-common tendency of stripping down the text, rather than engaging it as the whole entity that it is. One example that immediately comes to mind in the context of what Tolkien references here is in parables scholarship. Particularly under the influence of Adolf Jülicher, it was once (and, in some circles, still is) popular to operate under the assumption that parables had one and only one point to which everything else reduced down, and so parables could not function like allegories. This, in turn, led to expositions like Bernard Brandon Scott’s volume on Jesus’s parables that reduced them all to such mundanities that one wonders why the parables were preserved at all if all they were teaching was what he claimed.7 Rather, parables were memorable because of their various parts working together as a whole and because of the richness of metaphorical and allegorical correspondences. These elements are not window dressing on a main idea, but are contributions to the teaching in their own right.
Where Tolkien begins drawing together these points about scholarship, the theme, and even the theology of Beowulf is with his description of the theme as it relates to monsters and heroes:
Heroic lays may have dealt in their own way – we have little enough to judge by – a way more brief and vigorous, perhaps, though perhaps also more harsh and noisy (and less thoughtful), with the actions of heroes caught in circumstances that conformed more or less to the varied but fundamentally simple recipe for an heroic situation. In these (if we had them) we could see the exaltation of undefeated will, which receives doctrinal expression in the words of Byrhtwold at the battle of Maldon. But though with sympathy and patience we might gather, from a line here or a tone there, the background of imagination which gives to this indomitability, this paradox of defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged, its full significance, it is in Beowulf that a poet has devoted a whole poem to the theme, and has drawn the struggle in different proportions, so that we may see man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time.8
As I have noted before, and as I will have occasion to note many more times in future work, this theme also comes to expression in Tolkien’s own work under the influence of Beowulf. The Norse spirit was one defined by indomitable will pushing against inevitable defeat. As such, although the direction of logical causation is less clear, related to this spirit are elements of Norse theology, such as Valhalla being for those who die in battle (expressing indomitable will in the face of death) and their eschatology being expressed in the battle of Ragnarök, wherein almost all of the gods die in battle against the forces of chaos. In this theology, right and wrong had nothing to do with victory or defeat. Even the greatest warrior, like a Beowulf, can fall to the forces of chaos as exemplified by the monsters, but their greatness in Norse estimation was not measured by “competence” or ability to finally overcome all obstacles, for final defeat is inevitable. Rather, their greatness is measured by absolute resolution to not be cowed by such final defeat, to exert one’s will to the bitter end, never wavering amidst the waves of chaos, even if one must ultimately be drowned by them.
As such, Norse mythology and Norse theology, resonating as they do in Old English tales like Beowulf, are defined by tragedy, for human existence itself is a tragedy in the face of this final defeat.9 But Beowulf is, of course, not an undiluted presentation of Norse paganism, for it comes from the Christian era reflecting on the era of Beowulf as the darkened past. It is thus “a fusion that has occurred at a given point of contact between old and new, a product of thought and deep emotion.”10 In the distant past of Tolkien’s England, “this imagination was brought into touch with Christendom, and with the Scriptures. The process of ‘conversion’ was a long one, but some of its effects were doubtless immediate: an alchemy of change (producing ultimately the mediaeval) was at once at work.”11 For the Beowulf-poet, one of the most significant contributions the Norse make to this fusion of horizons (not a syncretism, per se, as I note further below) is “the theory of courage,” “the creed of unyielding will” that defines it.12
In this new framework, as noted in my commentary on Tolkien’s volume on Beowulf, the major point of contact for explicating the monsters was the line of Cain, presented as persisting in some fashion after Noah’s flood. Both the monsters and the line of Cain represent the persistence of evil and the inability of humans to finally resist and overcome it when left to themselves.13 Christians, of course, faced the same forces of chaos and were subject to the vulnerabilities of mortal existence, but their story presents a major difference:
The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God … the eternal Captain of the new. Even so the vision of the war changes. For it begins to dissolve, even as the contest on the fields of Time thus takes on its largest aspect. The tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important. It is no defeat, for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, the Arbiter who is above the mortal world. Beyond there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of the pysas and sigel-hearwan of heathen imagination.14
Christian eschatology, shaped as it is not only by the eschatological visions of the OT (seen most poignantly in Revelation), but also by the remembrance of Jesus’s resurrection, presents a hope of final, everlasting victory. The Messiah who was crucified was ultimately vindicated by the God who raises the dead and given the everlasting life that utterly conquers death. Those who are in him will likewise receive this vindicative and ultimately vivifying victory. The tragedy of human life is given its great eucatastrophe by the Author. The condemnation of final defeat is overturned by the great Arbiter with his verdict of victory, the same verdict he gave to the Christ he raised from the dead (and whom he unites others to by the Holy Spirit). The monsters persist for now, but there is hope for a time when they will be no more, when God will be all in all. The ending they receive in the Christian story is starkly different from the one they receive in the Norse story of Ragnarök.
With such a shift in worldview narrative, what then is the value of reflecting on the pre-Christian past represented in Beowulf? This is, of course, a matter that Tolkien wrote extensively on in his commentary. What is crucial to note for now is that the Beowulf-poet saw value in not dismissing this story as utterly irrelevant, but as the earlier chapters in a story defined Christianly, in a manner analogous to the OT’s anticipation of Christ. However, these anticipations of the gospel are obviously not at the same level, since the OT is the product of God’s special revelation, it is by reference to the OT that the poet frames Hrothgar’s wisdom, and it is by reference to creation according to Genesis that Grendel is driven into his frenzy.15
In some sense, God must still have been at work ahead of the arrival of the gospel, which this text commemorates through memorializing,
man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned. It would seem to have been part of the English temper in its strong sense of tradition, dependent doubtless on dynasties, noble houses, and their code of honour, and strengthened, it may be, by the more inquisitive and less severe Celtic learning, that it should, at least in some quarters and despite grave and Gallic voices, preserve much from the northern past to blend with southern learning, and new faith.16
This temperament, when Christianized, became an impetus for preserving the pagan past in a new framework, perceiving God’s truth in it, and seeing where God is at work even before the name of Christ is spoken on human lips.
Again, it is important to note that what Tolkien describes the Beowulf-poet as accomplishing is not a syncretism of Christianity and pagan thought. Tolkien argues, against his predecessors, that Beowulf is not by any means a muddled presentation on this theological or religious level, but one that maintains important distinctions.17 It is rather that the pagan past is reinterpreted in light of the wisdom of the Scriptures and Christian theology. As Tolkien says, in describing well the beliefs of the poet, “the supreme quality of the old heroes, their valour, was their special endowment by God, and as such could be admired and praised.”18 Such is an expression of that crucial missionary notion from Acts 14:15–17 that the living God, the Creator and Sustainer of all, had previously allowed the nations to go their own ways, but that even in the meantime before the gospel was proclaimed to them, he had not left himself without witness. In the text of Acts, Paul points to examples of God doing good for the nations, giving rains from heaven, fruitful seasons, and satisfying hearts with food and cheerfulness. But one can see the expansions of this idea in terms of theology and even worship in Acts 17:22–28, as Paul uses the reference to “the unknown God” in Athens as a preparation for the gospel he was proclaiming to the Athenians. There, again, Paul notes that God was permissive of the past times of ignorance, even if he had not left them in complete ignorance, but now the time—and, indeed, the framework of their theology and worship—has changed with the coming of the gospel (17:29–31).
Beowulf thus serves as an elegy, a long prelude to a dirge for the pagan past, commemorating the struggles of those with indomitable will like Beowulf, incapable of final victory by themselves, but honorable nonetheless for how they fought with what God had gifted them.19 That indomitable will that represented the highest ideals of the North was a gift of empowerment, courage, and even integrity from God, preparing people for the life of perseverance that characterizes the faithful, but incomplete in itself until the gospel comes (even as the indomitable human by himself could not hope to attain final victory outside of this Christian story). As the poet looks back on this past in writing this elegy, he presents his fusion of horizons as what Tolkien describes as “essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.”20 Beowulf thus becomes the paradigmatic figure for this pagan past in his own progression through this opposition, but he is now given a new frame. Crucial for this reframing is Hrothgar’s exhortation to Beowulf, wherein a speech of wisdom becomes a means of divine revelation for the hero, and a preparation for the gospel for the audience at large.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 5.
Ibid., 5–6.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 14. Cf. ibid., 30.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 15–16.
I have added this footnote later because I did not remember at the time that I got this point from Klyne R. Snodgrass, “From Allegorizing to Allegorizing: A History of the Interpretation of the Parables of Jesus,” in The Challenge of Jesus’ Parables, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 23.
Tolkien “Beowulf,” 17–18.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 20, 21.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 26–27.
Ibid., 23–24.
Ibid., 38–39.
Ibid., 42.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 28.