Chapter 20 - Allegorical Representation

Summary

MANY ATTEMPTS HAVE been made to interpret Beowulf on the basis of what may be assumed, from a purely literary point of view, to have been in the mind of an Old English Christian author. It has for example been suggested that the poem is a critique of Germanic hero worship, an elegy to a departed Germanic heroic culture, or an allegory of the Anglo-Saxon politics of various periods. Above all, though, scholars have applied a Christian perspective, viewing Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the Serpent as symbols of evil in general, and Grendel in particular, in his underground abode, as a metaphor for the devil himself. If that were the case then, mirabile dictu, the aforesaid potentate would have been safely out of action, one-armed and decapitated in his gloomy lair, ever since the sixth century. That comforting thought is dashed, however, by the fact that the poem is unlikely to have been composed by a Christian author.

The nightmarish figures of the Grendelkin and the Serpent, and the monsters Beowulf encounters on the sea, have at the same time been construed as expressions of popular superstition. Against that idea, though, we have to set the remarkably realistic, concrete, and down-to-earth character of the rest of the poem. The contrast is sharp enough to raise the question whether we really are concerned here with primitive folk belief.

To understand the monsters of the poem, we clearly have to look in other directions. And we should do so assuming that the poem is essentially a manifestation of pagan Scandinavian tradition.

A Metaphorical World

Oral poetry builds to a large extent on imagery, and Beowulf is one long demonstration of the art of formulating vivid kennings, metaphors, and other circumlocutions. Scandinavian, early Anglo-Saxon, and wider Germanic decorative arts from the sixth and seventh centuries similarly bear witness to a refined metaphorical way of thinking, with stylized snake-and dragon-like creatures and birds of prey as leitmotifs, pulled apart into a jumble of heads and limbs. This is how Leslie Webster (2005, 2) describes this Germanic visual world, with its roots in pagan thinking: