Pagans and Monsters and Epics! Oh my!

"So Grendel waged his lonely war,

inflicting constant cruelties on the people,

atrocious hurt. He took over Heorot,

haunted the glittering hall after dark,

but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,

he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord.

These were hard times, heart-breaking

for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors, 

the highest in the land, would lend advice,

plotting how best the bold defenders

might resist and beat off sudden attacks.

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

offering to idols, swore oaths

that the killer of souls might come to their aid

and save the people. That was their way,

their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts

they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge

... was unknown to them."

I've changed gears from Homer to another great "epic" poet, the anonymous composer of Beowulf. I was debating trying my hands at Boethius earlier tonight, but somehow the reason and passion just weren't cutting it for me. So here's a piece that is without both-- it exemplifies what it means to be without rationality, and, in a sense, without passion as well. I want to say a couple of things to contextualize the passage and then come back to some of the ideas I may have about it: the poet, it seems, belongs and identifies with a Christian world, but places his narrative in a pre-Christian land. At the same time, because his meter is not without ideas of salvation and divine justice, I see it as essentially layered with both the pagan and Christian tradition.

To come back to the passage at hand though-- we're still early in the poem, Grendel the monster who will eventually be destroyed by Beowulf is at large, and the Danes, a pagan people, are existing in a kind of a reflex, begging for salvation in the face of destruction. There seem to be a number of things going on here, but I want to focus on this idea of a "lonely war." Indeed, what does it mean for Grendel to be alone? But what does it mean for the "Shieldings" or the people of the epic to be alone? If Grendel ravages alone because of his ancestor Cain, who are the Danes at this particular moment, a people who are deeply alone because of their singular disconnect with the narrator? It's a slightly complex thought, but this is how I see this passage as exemplifying the Danes as a more lonely people than a monster like Grendel: Grendel has an ancestry that connects him to Cain, the biblical figure who murdered his brother and became the father, at least according to our poet, of giants, elves, and other evil phantoms. The Danes, on the other hand, are not given this genealogy. Without doubt, they are under the watchful eye of the poet's god who watches over them and keeps Grendel from the throne, but they have other gods, idols to whom they pray and sacrifice, but not the god of Grendel and the poet. In other words, the question this passage raises is what does it mean to be saved by a god who is not your own? What does it mean for a people to be a narrated by a poet who dismisses "their way, their heathenish hope."

If the Danes are a people who do not know their creator, does Grendel know his? Is Grendel, through a clear ancestry, somehow closer to the narrator's God than the Danes, the people who will be saved, are? Of course, the whole poem can be read as a Christian allegory, but what's at stake here is at the level of narrative. Grendel's loneliness surely lies in his evil, but the lonely battle fought by the Danes is explained by the disconnect of their being from the narrative itself. I don't usually like to bring the theoretical into this blog, but I want to quickly mention Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist, who sees the epic as separate from the novel in the way that it has only one view of the world. The poet and his people are one, as Homer was one with the warriors and the travellers, and as Virgil was one with Aeneas and his people. In this passage, there are two voices, maybe three. There is the voice of Grendel, branched off from God's creation through Cain, there is the voice of the narrator, convinced of the presence of the Christian god, and there is finally, the voice of the Danes, broken but still speaking of what it knows to be familiar, what it thinks can save these beleaguered people.

I want to end with coming back to the first stanza. Grendel is being kept from the throne by "the Lord." The battle, and I don't want to do a Christian reading here, is being fought between a creator and a descendant of the figure who threatened creation. What is keeping Grendel from the throne is indeed an invisible force, but this force, I think, occupies the level of the narrative as well. It's possible because the narrator is, in a way, closer to Grendel than he is to the Danes. Grendel is not a pagan outside of Christian discourse all together, in fact he is very much a part of it. Perhaps, then, I should take back my argument about three world views and shear it down to just two. Grendel and the narrator vs. the Danes.

(Beowulf, translated from the Old English by Seamus Heaney. Image: the first page of the original Beowulf manuscript, courtesy The British Library)