ABSTRACT

What astonishes the present-day beholder of the questions most tied up with Beowulf in older research is its belief in the significance the Beowulf epic is supposed to have had in its time. So far as this view does not rest on unconscious grounds like the tacitly assumed parallel with the Nibelungenlied etc., it rests on proofs of a totally brittle kind. Brandl’s heading 33 in Brandl 1908, ‘Beowulf imitated for three centuries’ now needs no further refutation [a note refers to Schücking 1905:44 and Morsbach 1906:276], ‘the dominant position which Beowulf took within the AS. epic’ (Brandl 1908: section 70) has only been able to find credence from the fact that this work’s stylistic peculiarities, which are naturally just as eclectic in its language as in its materials, were postulated out of hand as the model for the remaining literary corpus.—Indeed one would be assuming truly bad taste in the literarily highly developed world of the Anglo-Saxons if one were to accept that this poem could have meant very much to it, this work which possesses neither anything of the tragic greatness of the conflict-narratives of Hildebrand’s blow (cp. p. 370

by Alcuin’s letter shows that this judgement is not an anachronism, but this lost poem, about whose story we can conclude a good deal, shows itself to be precisely full of stirring psychological conflicts. Beowulf knows nothing of these things, unless it brushes by them with fleeting side-glances. It is different from the best Germanic legendary materials through its complete lack of a tragic kernel. Against that it is of a striking ‘propriety’. Chadwick rightly stresses that it lacks any mention ‘of immoral or unseemly conduct’, that it is ‘free from references of any kind which could offend even the most fastidious taste’. Others have wished to find in it ‘a monkish abstinence when speaking of women’, and indeed the mægð scyne of 3016 remains exceptional in her appearance (see Klaeber 1912:178). The discreet mention of Fitela is also striking, in brief, Beowulf is like a book which, as a present-day Christmas catalogue would put it, ‘can without concern be put in the hand of a growing young person’. The life of the hero is a chain of altruistic good deeds for his friends and subordinates. He seems such a model that it has been possible to make a spiritedly carried-out but certainly untenable attempt to interpret him as an allegory of the Redeemer (Klaeber 1912). From this didacticism one cannot shake off the impression, which in view of the important role which Saxon poems play in the instruction of youth (see p. 382 above) perhaps gains probability, that this poem with its didactic tendency, which comes out in its story as in its details, was intended above all as an instruction for youth.