St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ACADEMIC REVIEW 2025

the 'muddle-headed' musings of a poet who cannot quite fathom the changing times. Instead, he imagines the Beowulf poet as fully ensconced in a Christian world, and beginning first with Scripture rather than applying it later, and yet also capable of ‘looking back on the heroism and sorrow’ of pagan times. Since Tolkien there have been other very influential accounts of Beowulf . In Early Medieval Britain c. 500-1000 , Professor Rory Naismith argues that the Beowulf poet was well aware that the setting of the story in Scandinavia of the 4th-6th centuries ‘situated Beowulf and other characters in a pre Christian setting’. Naismith argues that the setting is presented in a 'subtle way' and notes that the narrative voice of the poem, ‘looking back from the perspective of a Christian age’, alludes to ‘God and divine power intervening in the lives of these pagans’. However, some of the pagan figures – particularly figures like Beowulf and Hrothgar, King of the Danes, who are presented as wise – also ‘refer to a single god or ‘lord’ as controlling earthly events, as if they somehow knew the (for the poet and audience) underlying reality of a Judaeo-Christian worldview, or at least thought of their chief deity in the same way’. Naismith also notes that there is no overt reference by name to any pagan deity, and also no use of capitals in references to the Christian God, thus ‘leaving the distinction murky’. Also, Naismith adds, the Beowulf poet sometimes ‘plays on the discrepancy between what the Christian audience knows and what the characters in the poem do not’. For example, Naismith writes, there is the moment when Beowulf slays Grendel’s mother with a sword on which is inscribed the story of the Biblical flood. When Beowulf shows the hilt to Hrothgar he is moved by the story, but the poet emphasises that he cannot comprehend its meaning. Naismith continues: What the poet undertakes is a sort of retrospective conversion. The characters of Beowulf move precariously through a world that was fundamentally Christian, guided by innate moral and spiritual fibre that was framed in Christian terms, yet without the benefits brought by knowing the true religion. Though certain of the Christian worldview, Naismith continues, the Beowulf poet saw ‘much to praise’ among the pagan heroes. They are not yet Christian, but ‘for the most part avoiding the taint of paganism that lurked, above all, in pagan acts’. They are constituted in the poem, Naismith argues, as ‘in their natural state… fundamentally good’. The most direct

Instead, he argues that the poem dramatises the shift in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from a pagan to a Christian worldview. It was not, Tolkien argues, that the Anglo-Saxons failed to ‘keep Scandinavian bogies and the Scriptures separate in their puzzled brains’ and mixed up pagan and Christian gods and devils. Instead, he argues that the Anglo-Saxon and Norse imagination was ‘brought into touch with Christendom, and with the Scriptures’. The process of conversion was a long one, Tolkien continues, but ‘some of its effects were doubtless immediate: an alchemy of change […] was at once at work’. In Beowulf, writes Tolkien, a Christian poet deliberately combines pagan and Christian elements, creating a powerful blend of old and then-present worlds. For example, references to the undoubtedly Biblical figure of Cain are qualified with references to eotenas and ylfe, which are the jötnar and álfar of Norse – or giants and elves. Tolkien writes: ‘This is not due to mere confusion – it is rather an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, is kindled. At this point new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited. For Tolkien, the Beowulf poet is not a 'beer-bemused' pagan at all, but a great author who like Virgil, was capable of casting their mind deeply into 'the long-ago' of the pagan world. This poet, adds Tolkien, knew much about the old days about such things as sea-burial and the funeral pyre, for instance, and this knowledge was 'rich and poetical'. Yet, the poet also knew that those days were 'heathen, noble, and hopeless' writes Tolkien, with no hope of light beyond the mead hall, just darkness. This pre-Christian worldview, writes Tolkien, had been superseded in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at the time the Beowulf poet was writing, but it was not entirely forgotten: ‘The shadow of its despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there. The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt.’ For Tolkien, the Christian aspects of Beowulf are not interpolations, clumsy additions to a pagan script, and neither are they

‘ Is Beowulf a pagan paper that has been “forcibly converted” to Christianity, akin to the old shrines? ’

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