Chapter 12 - Results of Primary Analysis, Step 2

Summary

FROM THE LAST five chapters, the following conclusions can be drawn.

Based on a comparison with historical evidence, the main narrative of Beowulf can be dated with considerable confidence to the end of the Migration Period, essentially the first half of the sixth century. This is consistent with the chronological assessment of the material culture of the poem.

The type of elite setting reflected in references throughout the poem to prestigious objects such as neck and arm rings, solid gold, and mail shirts is well documented archaeologically from Migration Period Scandinavia, but is not found in Anglo-Saxon England at any time prior to the late Viking Age. The contrast with Scandinavia could not be more stark. Consequently, this special material and ideological setting cannot possibly have been portrayed as distinctly as it is by an Old English author on the basis of either that author's personal experience or antiquarian frames of reference.

Equally, given that archaic features of Old English in the text clearly show that the narrative of the poem was circulating in England no later than around ad 700, such an author cannot have found inspiration in the Scandinavia of his own day, as neck and arm rings and, by and large, solid gold as well were not to be found there either at that time. The material and ideological setting of the poem is firmly located in the first half of the sixth century, the end of the Migration Period.

It is no less evident that the very limited Christian elements in Beowulf were added secondarily to a clearly pagan core. Particularly telling is the fact that the “Christian voice” of the poem does not understand the pagan cremations and the associated complex notions of the soul that are depicted with such realism. The poem's accounts of these cremations also have a tangibility that points to personal experience beyond anything accessible to an Old English Christian poet. Cremation burials are extremely uncommon in England after 600, and richly furnished male inhumation burials are very uncommon from the second quarter of the seventh century onwards. It is also striking that there is no Christian message in the strict sense, and that not a single person in the poem is portrayed as being guided by a Christian faith and Christian ambitions, or is buried according to Christian practice.