Biblical and Theological Commentary on Tolkien's Beowulf, Part 2
(avg. read time: 5–9 mins.)
At another point in his commentary on the encounter between Beowulf and Grendel, Tolkien again writes at some length about the theological framework. On the one hand, as with Samson, Beowulf believed in his vigor and that his strength was God’s gift (ll. 546–547), “and he meant to use it, even if in the last resort the issue was in God’s hands.”1 Such is the common characterization of the warrior’s piety, and it resonates as well in Denmark as in Israel and as in India.
At this point, he also makes comparisons of Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English romance that Tolkien also translated. Both works are concerned with aristocratic codes of honor and both adopt a critical stance towards them. However, the author of the latter can write from the perspective of a Christian author in a society in which Christianity is well established and indeed has influence to root out heresy among the elites. But the author of the former operates in an environment where the memory of the pagan past remains alive and well, where Christianity has only been established for a relatively short while, and in which Christianity “had done little, in the noble class, to soften the sentiments behind the code of honour.”2 Thus, our author takes up the known story of Beowulf and presents it in a Christian context, perhaps like those who so admired it had never considered before. I would encourage the reader to read pages 273–75 of Tolkien’s commentary for themselves to see how well Tolkien articulates the Christian purpose of the Beowulf-poet, as it would not do for me to quote the entirety of it here. But I can summarize and comment on his points.
The poet aims to convey at every juncture that there is one God, the King of the world and the ages forever. He is the one that the ancestors sometimes called Metod, the Ordainer who governs all events/fates/wyrd. He is the one that they knew was the source of life, of gifts, and of all good things, including the heroic gifts they valued so highly.
Within this larger framework, the poet points to Beowulf as embodying what he seeks to convey about the true God. It was this God who gave him his strength and Beowulf’s statements in this poem recognize that it is from God. He resembles in many ways the typical Norse hero, winning much glory by his deeds in combat, but he does what he does in service to others. This is exactly what happens in this story of his fight with Grendel, as this glorious deed was done in service to Hrothgar and his people. As Tolkien says, “He is loyal, even to his own disadvantage.”3
When the questions of succession and rule arose, Beowulf was not given to the tendencies of intrigue that characterize so many noble courts. Rather, he again used his gifts in service to others. This included slaying a dragon no one else in the kingdom could have slain, just as he had done with Grendel (and later, Grendel’s mother).
In these ways, Beowulf is presented as something of a fusion of horizons between the pagan past and the Christian present. He was functionally praeparatio evangelica (preparation for the gospel). He himself may have died fearing God’s judgment. But the God revealed in Christ, whom these elites in the poet’s audience, unlike Beowulf, had been able to learn of in this life, is merciful. His redemptive work claims in its scope even great heroes of the past like Beowulf because they responded as they did to the light that was given them. If they follow the example of Beowulf, albeit now with a more explicit knowledge of God in Christ, they too will receive his fate, “If you use your gifts as God wills. Brúc ealles wel! [Use all the gifts with honour]”4
But, as Tolkien says, “to present this ‘message’ in his day the poet had constantly to point his story, by reminder of God as Ruler, Giver, and Judge.”5 We have already seen how he did this early in the poem. We see it in references to God’s providence by multiple names (including “Metod” and “fate/fortune”). We see it in how God decides the outcome of these great struggles. We see it in references to God as Creator, including in the lead-up to Grendel’s first attack. We see it in how this conception reframes the monsters of the heroic past. And indeed, one can see it in more ways than what we have covered thus far or will cover yet. This homiletic bridging of the pre-gospel to post-gospel reality clearly made an impact. Remarkably, its impact was beyond the author’s imagination, as his work has become “the major piece of Old English verse that has survived the wrecks of time.”6 Some, no doubt, wish to do away with the Christian framework and find the “unvarnished” heroic tale more interesting than the poet’s purpose (one thinks of the various film adaptations, especially Robert Zemeckis’s malformed production). But without such bridgework, this story would not have resounded through the ages, as it has. Much like Snorri Sturluson, a man of a similar setting dealing with similar material, our poet has connected us with an old pre-Christian Norse story that we would not know but for him and for the value that he, as a Christian, found in it.
One point that is more ambiguous as to whether it belongs natively to the Christian framework or would have been native to a pre-Christian environment is Beowulf’s reference to the great “Day of Doom” (l. 797). Grendel is said to be subject to this Day of Doom like all others, which Tolkien sees as putting him in the position of a man, albeit an abominable one, belonging to the line of Cain, and not simply a demonic entity. This reference is immediately followed with a reference to God as Judge and so its place in the Christian framework as a reference to the final judgment is clear. But the Norse also conceived of punishment of the wicked, and their conception of Hell, while different from how Christians would fill out the concept, was still set apart from Valhalla.
The last bit of commentary most directly relevant to the text of Beowulf that is insightful for our purposes here is Tolkien’s commentary on Hrothgar’s sermon to Beowulf after he has slain Grendel’s mother. Along with his reward, he teaches Beowulf this lesson about arrogance and forgetfulness of God, lest Beowulf fall into the same fate as Heremod. Tolkien notes again the connections made between the mythology about giants in the background of Beowulf, whence came the sword Hrothgar examines before his sermon, and the provocative references of Gen 4 and 6. Of the giants, “on one side they were (in the language of Genesis vi.4) ‘mighty men which were of old, men of renown’, and also the makers of mighty works beyond human compass…. Yet they hated men, and were enemies.”7
But the blending of the pre-Christian Germanic environment and the Christian framework is more extensive in this sermon than this already observed connection. Hrothgar is keen to emphasize God’s Lordship, his sovereignty over all things, and how all the blessings of a glorified hero and ruler are but his gifts. As such, the worst that such a hero could do when presented with these gifts is to act as Heremod acted and become greedy, avaricious, thinking that the gifts are his inalienable possessions, and seeing others only as obstacles to acquiring and retaining them. Arrogance is thus presented as the temptation for one who lives too untroubled a life and allows the vigilance of conscience (the “guardian of his soul”) to sleep. When that happens, one becomes all too vulnerable to the arrows of the “slayer,” a resonant allusion to Eph 6:16 and a popular homiletical image in the early and medieval eras.
What is more, Tolkien notes the links between this sermon and Cynewulf’s Old English poem Crist (known today as Christ II). He observes that Hrothgar’s sermon has a resemblance to the poem “both of matter and turns of expression.”8 In fact, Tolkien posits that Cynewulf himself retouched this sermon to conform more to his own style. But this is not to say that the sermon itself comes from Cynewulf, as “the king’s address forms an organic element in the structure of the epic; and that the king should deliver a sermon of ‘high sentence’ is entirely in keeping with his character as imagined and depicted in the poem, and with the moral and serious temper of Beowulf as a whole.”9 But Cynewulf was likely drawn to such additions because this was where a work that he admired came closest in contact with his.
We have but one final item to consider for this brief and experimental commentary, for while Tolkien’s translation is complete, his commentary is not. He writes at length about the reference this poem makes to the story of Freawaru, the daughter of Hrothgar and Wealhtheow, and Ingeld, king of the Heathobards. They were married to end a feud between the peoples that was enflamed by the Danes’ murder of Froda, Ingeld’s father. Beowulf predicts that the feud will be reignited and Ingeld will turn against Hrothgar. What is most notable for our purposes are the connections Tolkien makes to other English allusions to the story of Ingeld. In Widsith we learn that Ingeld was defeated in an invasion of Hrothgar’s realm at Heorot and that the might of the Heathobards was destroyed. In a letter of Alcuin the theologian to Speratus, bishop of Lindisfarne, this point is made: “In the rectory of the monks the words of God should be read; there it is fitting that the reader be heard, not the harper, the discourse of the Fathers, not the songs of the pagans. What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”10
This statement is indirect testimony that stories like those of Beowulf and Ingeld, native Old English lays, were still heard in the British monasteries. By contrast, Alcuin represents a “stern and uncompromising reforming spirit,”11 that insists only the Scriptures and patristics (being the distinct artifacts of Christian culture) be heard in the monasteries, and in Latin at that. But Tolkien sees in the Beowulf-poet a via media, “no less Christian than Alcuin, yet does not consign all the past to oblivion (or to hell), but ponders it with increased insight and profundity.”12 As I noted before in my first entry on Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation, this is a way of thinking with a long pedigree (even by the Beowulf-poet’s time) in Christian teaching relating to the pre-Christian world. It also fit with medieval Catholic teaching about the continuity between the order of nature and the order of grace. In this framework, in which Tolkien also operated, there is certainly critique of what came before the gospel, but the stress remains on the streams of continuity and how they illustrate God’s work in preparing the way for the gospel in the given setting.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Mariner, 2015), 270.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 274.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 306.
Ibid., 309.
Ibid., 310–11.
Ibid., 328.
Ibid.
Ibid., 329.