ABSTRACT
The old theory that Beowulf is an essentially pagan work only slightly colored with the Christianity of a later scribe has now been dead for many years, and critics today generally agree that the poem is the unified work of a Christian author. 1 Indeed, most of the elements in Beowulf that once supplied arguments for its essential paganism-the function of Wyrd, the emphasis on the comitatus, the duty of revenge - are now recognized not as pagan but as secular values that were easily incorporated into the framework of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. 2
Likewise, though the stories of Beowulf and the monsters probably originated in pagan times, it is now generally acknowledged that they have been assimilated into a Christian world view with the monsters allied with the devil and Beowulf (or so Friedrich Klaeber and others have held) fitted to the pattern of Christ himsel£. 3 Yet the ghost of the old pagan-versus-Christian dispute still lingers, for along with the
Christian and Christianized secular elements the poem does contain some indisputably pagan features that have remained intractable to modern criticism. Moreover, the knockings of that spirit have become steadily more insistent, for the more deeply Christian the meanings of Beowulf are discovered to be, the more difficult become the stillunanswered questions raised by H. M. Chadwick in 1912: "If the poem preserves its original form and is the work of a Christian, it is difficult to see why the poet should go out of his way in v. 175 ff. to represent the Danes as offering heathen sacrifices. . . . Again why should he lay Beowulf himself to rest with heathen obsequies, described in all possible detail ... ? "4 Why, one must ask, should the poet's whole representation of the Danes and Geats include all the other details that Chadwick notes -the funeral ship (27 ff.), the observation of omens (204), and the use of cremation (1108 ff., 2124 ff., 3137 ff.)?S
The intrusion of these pagan elements into an otherwise completely Christian work presents more difficult problems than the simple matter of factual inconsistency. Certainly the poet is inconsistent in first showing us the Danes listening to the Christian account of the Creation and then, a few lines later, telling us that they knew nothing of God and sacrificed to idols. That is only the sort of historical inaccuracy that one expects in medieval poetry; Chaucer and Shakespeare confused pagan and Christian elements in much the same way.6 Poets (especially medieval poets) are responsible for total aesthetic effect rather than documentary accuracy. The difficulty in Beowulf is that the pagan elements seem to confound the aesthetic effect, to destroy the consistency of tone. Instead of casually mixing pagan and Christian, as so many medieval poets do, the Beowulf poet goes out of his way to draw our attention to the Danes' heathen sacrifices. Furthermore, the paganism that he describes is not simply literary or historical; it was a still strong and threatening force in his own day. For him to present his characters as heathens is, so we assume, to show them in the worst of possible lights. Alcuin, in his famous letter to the monks at Lindisfarne, defines for us the Christian Englishman's attitude toward the pagans:
Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? Angusta est domus: utrosque tenere non poterit. Non vult rex celestis cum paganis et perditis nominetenus regibus communionem habere "what has lngeld to do with Christ? Narrow is the house; it cannot hold both. The King of Heaven wants no fellowship at all with pagan and damned kings." 7 Given this attitude toward the heathens, our poet's insistence that his characters are both emphatically pagan and exceptionally good seems self-contradictory, and that apparent contradiction has seemed to many critics a touch of feebleness at the very heart of the poem, so feeble that even his warmest admirers have been forced either to fall back on the old theory of scribal tampering or to conclude that the poet simply blundered. 8
The blunder may be our own, for the apparent contradiction arises, not from the poem itself, but from our assumptions about the meaning of paganism to the poet and his audience. These assumptions have been based on our knowledge of one letter by Alcuin, written in a spirit of reforming zeal at the end of the eighth century, and scattered comments by Bede, who is not quite so inflexible in his attitude toward pagans as his doctrinal pronouncements make him seem. 9 The extreme distaste for everything pagan that these comments exhibit is not typical of the age to which the composition of Beowulf is usually assigned; beginning in the last years of the seventh century and extending throughout the eighth, the dominant attitude of Christian Englishmen toward the Germanic pagans was one of interest, sympathy, and occasionally even admiration. This was the period during which the English church was engaged in an intense missionary activity on the Continent, sending missionaries in significant numbers first to the Frisians and Danes and then to the Old Saxons and the tribes in central Germany. This major undertaking, the great interest that it aroused in England, and the attitude it fostered toward pagandom has received relatively little attention from students of Beowulf; yet it can shed considerable light on the problems raised by the pagan elements in the poem, revealing artistry where we thought we detected blunders.
