Basilisks and Beowulf

Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World

Tim Flight

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781789144345
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

An eye-opening, engrossing look at the central role of monsters in the Anglo-Saxon worldview—now in paperback. This book addresses a simple question: why were the Anglo-Saxons obsessed with monsters, many of which did not exist? Drawing on literature and art, theology, and a wealth of firsthand evidence, Basilisks and Beowulf reveals a people huddled at the edge of the known map, using the fantastic and the grotesque as a way of understanding the world around them and their place within it. For the Anglo-Saxons, monsters helped to distinguish the sacred and the profane; they carried God's message to mankind, exposing His divine hand in creation itself. At the same time, monsters were agents of disorder, seeking to kill people, conquer their lands, and even challenge what it meant to be human. Learning about where monsters lived and how they behaved allowed the Anglo-Saxons to situate themselves in the world, as well as to apprehend something of the divine plan. It is for these reasons that monsters were at the very center of their worldview. From map monsters to demons, dragons to Leviathan, we neglect these beasts at our peril.

VI

MEARCSTAPAN, PART ONE: THE GRENDELKIN

We come now to perhaps the most famous monsters in the whole of English literature: Grendel and his mother, known collectively as the Grendelkin. Like Beowulf we will attempt to pin down the Grendelkin in this chapter and, while trying to avoid murdering them, examine what makes them monsters, what motivates their rapacious evil and, most pertinently, what they really are.

The Text of Beowulf

As mentioned earlier, Beowulf is found only in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex, part of the volume Cotton MS Vitellius a XV. Beowulf’s neighbours in the manuscript include the Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. As discussed in the first chapter, the Nowell Codex manuscript dates to the late tenth or early eleventh century.¹ It contains five Old English texts, with Judith (an Old English retelling of the slaying of Holofernes) the other item. Beowulf comes after the Letter and is followed by Judith, the final item in the manuscript. Two scribes, known unimaginatively as Scribe A and Scribe B, wrote down all five texts. Scribe A wrote most of the manuscript, while Scribe B wrote roughly the final two-fifths of Beowulf and the entirety of Judith.²

Although the text as preserved in the Nowell Codex was written down around the end of the first millennium, it is indubitably far older. We know from palaeography that it was copied from another exemplar, meaning that Beowulf was once better represented in Anglo-Saxon libraries; but, based on the historical period and location of the events in the poem, it is likely that Beowulf was originally an oral tale passed by word of mouth, possibly among the earliest pagan settlers in England, before it was eventually committed to manuscript. The dating of the composition of the version we know today is a matter of fierce debate. Suggested dates range from the late seventh to early eleventh century, but most commentators generally agree upon an eighth- to early ninth-century origin. Many scholars have forged careers arguing for one date or another, but we can leave the debate here.³ With only a single manuscript of the poem, it is impossible to pinpoint precisely when Beowulf took its only known form, and we need only be mindful that Beowulf was a tale told long before it was committed to the Nowell Codex.

During the period between the first, oral tellings of Beowulf and the Nowell Codex version being copied by its two scribes, England was converted to Christianity. Although, as we have noted, this was far from a simple or instantaneous process, the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon England practised Christianity by the end of the first millennium, and the scriptoriums that produced the manuscript versions of Beowulf were at either monasteries or cathedrals. We therefore have an originally pagan tale about a pagan period of history, retold and interpreted by Christians. Much early scholarship on the poem focused on identifying the pagan aspects of the poem and lamenting the Christian ‘additions’ to it. However, besides the fact that we know next to nothing about Anglo-Saxon paganism, we also do not know when in the tale’s history it took its present form – whether that pre-dated its committal to a manuscript or whether any of the Christians who decided to write it down made any wholesale changes. Though the core tale of a man slaying monsters has links to Old Norse literature, in particular Grettis saga (Grettir’s Saga) and Hrólfs saga kraka (Saga of King Hrolf Kraki), these texts were copied down far later and, again, we know not what, if anything, was added to or taken away from their original versions by later authors. J.R.R. Tolkien explained the problem with focusing only on the ‘pagan’ elements using a rather neat allegory in his famous 1936 lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.⁴

The only contemporary links to the text we have, which we will be discussing across this chapter and the next, are from Old English literature, and so we will not be fruitlessly speculating on what was ‘original’ and what was ‘added’: Beowulf as we know it is a product of Anglo-Saxon culture, written by Christians. Instead, we will simply bask in the glory of a masterpiece in its only known form and examine how it fits our understanding of Anglo-Saxon monsters.

The World of Beowulf

In briefest terms, Beowulf is the story of a Geat warrior who travels to Denmark to rid King Hroðgar of a monster, named Grendel, who has been launching murderous raids on his great hall, Heorot, ever since it was first erected. After killing Grendel in single combat, it transpires that Grendel has a mother, who kills another Dane in revenge for her son’s death. Beowulf next kills her in her watery lair – again in single combat – and returns to his home a hero. Some years later, Beowulf is king of Geatland, and his peaceful fifty-year rule is disrupted when the dragon we met in Chapter Three is roused after losing a small piece of treasure. Learning of the terrible revenge the dragon has taken on his land and people, Beowulf fights it in single combat (aided at the eleventh hour by a trusty retainer, Wiglaf). Despite his great age, Beowulf is victorious, albeit mortally wounded. He dies of his injuries, to the understandable despair of his people.

Beowulf is a poem of place. Despite its English provenance, the action all occurs in sixth-century Denmark and Sweden, the ancestral Germanic homes of the Anglo-Saxons. Within the fictionalized version of these countries, the land is divided up into civilized and uncivilized places, with characteristically Anglo-Saxon flair.⁵ In fact, this technique of contrast and mutual definition makes Beowulf a version of Anglo-Saxon England in microcosm. First of all, we are introduced to Heorot, the centre of civilization, in the early part of the poem.

Then Hroðgar [a Danish king] was given military success, the worldly honour of war, so that his retainers eagerly obeyed him, young warriors that grew to a great band of men. It came into his mind that he would order men to build a palace, a great mead hall, that men should hear of forever, and within there to share all such as God gave him with young and old . . . then, I have widely heard, work was ordered from many people throughout this middle-earth, to decorate the people’s place [folcstede]. It came to pass in a space of time, swiftly according to men, that it was all ready, the greatest of palaces; he whose words had wide power gave it the name Heorot [‘hart’]. He did not fail his vow: he dealt rings, treasure at feast. The hall towered up, high and horn-beamed.⁶

Hroðgar’s natural instinct after his successes is to build a mighty hall. As we saw in the chapter on dragons, the hall was the literal and symbolic centre of Anglo-Saxon society. As well as commemorating the peace and prosperity that his military prowess has won, Hroðgar intends to use Heorot to share out treasure among his men as reward for their service and loyalty. This treasure in and of itself symbolized the ties of loyalty that bound men in fellowship, ensuring peace and cooperation. Simultaneously, Heorot is the place where the community meets to eat and drink together, and we later learn that men sleep in it. It is indicative of the mead hall’s centrality to the community that the poet calls Heorot folcstede (the people’s place). From Heorot, Hroðgar rules his kingdom, keeping the peace and defending the realm.

The great size of Heorot is not a piece of poetic hyperbole: Thetford Great Hall in Norfolk, for example, was almost 35 metres long.⁷ Heorot, the most splendid hall ever seen and symbol of a successful, peaceful society, represents the triumph of order over chaos. Hroðgar’s building of Heorot, moreover, mirrors the very act of Creation, as many critics have noted.⁸ For the philosopher and historian Mircea Eliade, ‘settlement is the repetition of a primordial act: the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of Creation.’⁹ This link is compounded by the court poet singing a song about God’s Creation to celebrate Heorot’s construction. Hroðgar is, anachronistically, a Christian, and acknowledges that his wealth and success come from God. Heorot, like all civilized places, is thus also a centre of Christianity.

To make any hall, trees, an important component of one of the most feared forms of wilderness, were transformed through mankind’s genius into a statement of sophisticated, civilized creation. The hall to the Anglo-Saxons represented the zenith of man’s triumph over nature, and halls stood as conspicuous physical metaphors for this impressive achievement. The situation of the hall, and its flexibility as a metaphor, is perhaps best captured by Bede:

The present life of men on earth, in comparison to that time which is unknown to us, seems to me as when you are sitting at a feast with your generals and attendants in winter time, the fire kindled in the hearth in the middle, and all within is warm, while outside the tempests of wintry rain and snow are raging; a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall, proceeding through one entrance and soon leaving through the other. For the time that it is inside, it is not touched by the tempests of winter, but after the smallest period of serenity has passed, it glides away from your eyes, soon returning from winter to winter once more. Thus this life of men appears for a little while; but of what comes afterwards, of what came before, we are utterly ignorant.¹⁰

Bede’s sparrow image still speaks to us powerfully, over a millennium later, about the transience and uncertainty of life. For our purposes, it is germane to note the stark contrast between the warmth and light within and the unknown, dark and hostile natural world without, for this disparity is a key component of Beowulf.

Directly opposed to Heorot in literal and metaphorical terms is the mere, home to the monster Grendel and his mother. The following description is Hroðgar’s account of where Beowulf must travel to fight Grendel’s mother.

They [the Grendelkin] occupy a secret land, wolf-slopes [wulfhleoþu], windy cliffs, the terrible fen-path, where the mountain-stream goes down beneath the cliffs’ mists, the flood under the ground. It is not far in the measure of miles from here that the mere stands; the frost-covered groves hang over it, the fast-rooted wood overshadows the water. There each night one might see fire on the water, a fearful wonder. No one wise of the sons of men lives that knows the bottom [of the mere]; though the heath-stepper [hæðstapa, a stag] is fatigued by dogs, the hart [heorot] with strong horns, seeks the wood, put to flight from afar, he will sooner give up his life, his vital organs on the bank, before he will hide his head in there. That is not a pleasant place! From there the surging waves rise up dark towards the clouds, when stirred by wind, a hateful tempest, until the sky becomes gloomy, the heavens weep.¹¹

The mere inhabited by Grendel and his mother is the Anglo-Saxon wilderness par excellence. Beyond the fact that monsters live there, we see in Hroðgar’s description many of the topographical signifiers of wilderness that we have been discussing over the course of this book. The mere is out in the fens, the same environment as that in which demons torment St Guthlac. It is home to wolves, after which a landmark is named, creatures of satanic association that live only in the wilderness and have a close affinity with criminals and exiles. Surrounding the mere is a thick wood, one of the characteristic signs of wilderness, with a darkening c...