St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

the more “dialogic process” of conversion? Or is it a text that represents a Christian culture that was sufficiently secure that pagan elements could be memorialised in imaginative works? Readings of the poem depend on how we understand and interpret the changes – whether discursive or coerced – to the perception of reality and worldview of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Having established something of this background of conversion in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, I will now turn to Beowulf and discuss some of the arguments around whether it was a “pagan paper”, or a “pagan Christian paper,” or a “Christian paper.” A key text in this discussion is The Monsters and the Critics – originally given as a lecture by J R R Tolkien in 1936. Tolkien disagreed with those critics of Beowulf who castigated the poem for being ‘something that it was not – for example, primitive, pagan, Teutonic’. For Tolkien, far too many critics had diminished Beowulf as: a half-baked native epic […] the confused product of a committee of muddleheaded and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons […] a string of pagan lays edited by monks. Among these critics, writes Tolkien, was W P Ker, who wrote a book called The Dark Ages (1904). Ker dismissed the poem as “too simple”, a tale of monsters and a hero aiming to slay them; a “merest commonplace of heroic legend” and nothing else. Tolkien also cites a companion argument in Professor R W Chambers’s Beowulf and the Heroic Age (1925). Chambers argues that the trivial aspects of the story are placed at the centre of the poem, and elements of wild folk tale have ‘usurp[ed] the place of honour, and [driven] into episodes and digressions the things which should be the stuff of well-conducted epic’. Tolkien disagrees greatly with these critics who find the poem “simple,” “primitive” and “silly” – as he puts it. He argues for the poem as deeply philosophical and expressive, quoting such lines as ‘lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod’ (life is fleeting, all departs, light and life together). This line also evokes Bede’s account of the advisor to King Edwin describing life as akin to a sparrow arriving briefly into the warm, lighted mead hall and then vanishing into darkness forever. Such lines, therefore, indicate a pagan aspect to the poem. Christianity, after all, would suggest that Jesus is Life and Light, and offers redemption, lighting the way to Heaven. But Tolkien does not think that these pagan elements are simple, nor primitive, and does not think they are entirely incompatible with the Christian aspects of the poem.

Christian kings in the ensuing generations. However, the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms can be considered roughly complete by the end of the 7th century, with the death of the last pagan king – Aruald of the Isle of Wight. In Early Medieval Britain, c. 500–1000 , Professor Rory Naismith argues that ‘importantly, the new religion was also defined negatively, as the abandonment of key practices of previous beliefs: a baptismal formula, coming from Germany but probably reflecting Anglo-Saxon influence, required the new initiate to foreswear ‘the devil,’ ‘idolatry’ and a series of named deities – Woden, Thunor and Saxnot […] before asking whether they believed in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ Professor Naismith continues: The oath implied a confrontation of religious systems, though […] there are good reasons to doubt whether the devil-worship and idolatry condemned by the Christians really constituted a structured religion in the same way as Christianity. Professor Naismith also writes: ‘Implanting the Christian religion, then, involved important adjustments to how people thought of their place in the world.’ For example, Bede famously describes an adviser to the Anglo-Saxon 7th-century King Edwin (also known as Eadwine or Æduinus) summarising the pagan lack of belief in eternity as: Like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. Professor Naismith makes the point that these sorts of arguments were well known and formed part of a “dialogic process”, in which missionaries were taught a series of standard approaches to pagans. Pope Gregory, Professor Naismith explains, also advised missionaries ‘to forcibly convert pagan shrines to Christian usage’. This background is of great relevance to the discussion of Beowulf. Is Beowulf a pagan paper that has been “forcibly converted” to Christianity, akin to the old shrines? Or is it part of

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