The Prologue

Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band is made of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by agreement. If this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the name of “kingdom,” not by the removal of covetousness but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. When the king asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, the pirate answered: “I mean the same as you, who seize the whole earth. But because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber. While you, who do it with a great fleet, are styled emporer.”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx——Augustine, The City of God, Chapter IV

xxxThe Prologue presents Scyld Scefing in the radiance of power: He is rich and admired by men. In the eyes of the pagan Danes, Scyld Scefing is certainly a good king. But from a Christian perspective the first great Danish marauder has his shadow side. His power comes through terror, his wealth through pillage. The poet chooses to introduce the progenitor of the Danes, not through acts of war against soldiers on the battlefield, but through acts of terror against the feast halls of his neighbors. Like Grendel, Scyld Scefing is bold (ellen) and terrifying (egsian, egesa); and like the monster, the great Danish progenitor is associated with the devastation of “upturned mead benches.” The likeness is explicit, though perhaps too briefly elaborated for modern readers unaquainted with the terror of feast hall attacks. For Alfred’s nation, however, the “mead hall attack” was no abstraction. It was associated with the terror of England’s most famous “surprise attack”—Guthrum’s notorious assault on Chippenham, as infamous in its time as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor is on ours. If the dread of such hall attacks figured in Alfred’s decision to mobilize the defenses of his nation, they are also writ large in this poem. Throughout Beowulf, hall attacks recur as the central act of depravity in monsters and men.
xxxYet if the poem is to be viewed from an Alfredian perspective, it is worth remembering that the heroic culture of pagan marauders was only a few generations removed from Alfred himself. His father Aethelweard, though claiming descent from Scyld Scefing, was the first in the Wessex line to wholeheartedly embrace Christian piety—offering a tenth of his kingdom to the Church. Thus, the poet presents a mixed portrait. Scyld Scefing is introduced as a “wrecker of mead halls,” yet the Prologue studies the magnificence of the man, not his malevolence. According to legend, Scyld Scefing was blessed by Fortune, having begun life as a foundling, a “wretch” washed ashore. His dramatic rise to power is itself a cause for admiration. (Indeed, the idea that good Fortune is a sentinel of merit in a man is commonplace in our own time.) But a man like Alfred, informed by the meditations of Boethius, would have understood that an omnipotent God acts behind the vagaries of Fortune. This is also the worldview of the Beowulf poet, who takes pains to remind his audience that the king of the Danes receives his power from a higher king, the one true God, who grants sovereignty to all earthly rulers, righteous and unrighteous alike, from David to Nebachudnezzar.
xxxThrough the portrait of a glorious marauder, the problem of authority is introduced. Scyld Scefing is certainly a “good” king to the Danes. But what is a “good” king? From the perspective of pagan culture, a “good” king is strong and generous. From the perspective of the Christian poet, these virtues derive from God. God rules in strength; so a king must rule in strength. God bestows gifts upon humanity; so a king must bestow gifts upon his followers. Christian doctrine would see pagan virtue in Scyld Scefing, while acknowledging that these virtues alone cannot redeem him. Strength and generosity are virtues in every culture— a principle exemplified in Scyld’s son, Beow.
xxxThe poet concludes his meditation on kingly virtue with the image of Scyld’s death and funeral. Here the Prologue begins to eddy back beneath the glorious outer layer, creating an undertow that typifies the poem. Throughout Beowulf images of earthly glory invite our admiration, only to crumble to dust (or melt or burn or drown, or simply fail), forcing us to see the mortal end of human vanity. The mighty king of the Danes is subject to the will of an even mightier king, the Lord of Heaven and Earth: He does not choose the time of his dying but is taken in his strength.
xxxThe grandeur of Scyld’s funeral will impress the modern reader. Like Pharoah’s tomb, the shining death ship exemplifies pagan belief in an Afterworld that mirrors life on earth: Scyld’s followers, expecting their king to rule after death, heap his ship with treasure. Yet even as such expectations are presented, they are undercut. The description of the death ship, “icy and ready,” is both a realistic image of a Nordic funeral scene and a metaphor charged with death, not life. Elsewhere, icicles are wål rapas (death ropes), inert until loosed by the hand of God. “Readiness” is also linked with death. The ship’s furnishings are instruments of death—the weapons of battle, not the adornments of the hearth. Finally, a verbal repetition reminds us that the wealth Scyld “possessed” (aeht) will soon be “possessed” by the Flood.
xxxThe erosion of pagan expectation is most severe when the narrator comments that, for all the lavish offerings, Scyld is essentially as naked as he came. The man who, at the beginning of his life was sent across the sea as a foundling, is sent, at the end of his life, across the sea in a lavishly adorned ship. Scyld’s grand ending appears to be the opposite of his inauspicious beginning -- until the poet ironically comments that Scyld has been given “no less” by the Danes than did those who “sent him first across the sea, a babe, naked and alone.” The poet “plays his hand” in this irony, while at the same time maintaining a kind of spiritual (and literary) equilibrium: refusing to pronounce judgment on the man. The gleaming death ship is left as a puzzle for our contemplation. Was Scyld Scefing a “good” king in the eyes of God? The poet’s response: “Men cannot truthfully say who received him.

Fitt I
“That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been.”
Ecclesiastes 3:10

xxxScyld Scefing’s ship funeral offers a stillpoint in time. The next section passes quickly through two generations: from Beow to Healfdene to Hrothgar. The flow of generations is tinged by an awareness that the life of a man is a small thing in the scope of eternity. The span also links son with father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. In the heroic pagan world, the father-son relationship defines identity: Hrothgar is not merely “Hrothgar,” he is “the son of Healfdane,” or as Scyld Scefing’s inheritor, he is “lord of the Scyldings.” Patrilineal identity also defines Grendel (the son of Cain) and Beowulf (the son of Ecgtheow).
xxxThis emphasis on patrilineal inheritance in pagan patriarchal culture is complemented by the poet’s own Biblical perspective, especially in the proverb: “The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.” This Judaic understanding of historical cause-and-effect was re-cast by Christian theology as the Doctrine of Original Sin. According to Christian theology, evil is an “inheritance.” Or, put another way, fathers bequeath a spiritual as well as material legacy to their sons -- going all the way back to the “first father,” Adam. The poet explicitly utilizes this Biblical paradigm in his discussion of Grendel’s sinful nature, and in so doing, expresses a central tenet of Christian theology. Grendel is not merely an evil monster, he is an nheritor of evil. Specifically, Grendel is the inheritor of Cain, a man who murdered his own brother.
xxxIf the pattern of inheritance wer restricted to Grendel, the theme of brother-murder and of relationship to Cain would be a merely decorative addendum. Indeed, it was once considered to be such by those scholars who held to the theory of lays and of “coloring.” Both theories posited that this explicitly Christian motif had been "added" to the old Germanic boogeyman in order to make the poem more palatable to a Christian worldview. Yet Hrothgar is the inheritor of Scyld Scefing, a wrecker of mead halls, a man who is buried by a pagan (materialist) culture lacking redemption.
xxxHrothgar has not only inherited the legacy of his marauding ancestor Scyld Scefing, he has inherited a set of pagan virtues as well. The king of the Danes is a marauder, but he is a generous marauder: To reward his followers he builds a glorious mead hall. Hrothgar triumphs in his victory; God triumphs in Creation itself. Hrothgar adorns his hall with golden “finery” (fråtwe); God adorns the earth with the “finery” of leaves and branches. Where God has created a family of men; Hrothgar’s hall is a house of brothers. As an act of generosity and kinship, Hrothgar’s house of gift-giving mirrors God’s Creation (which is also a house of gift-giving). However, there is a difference. The king of the Danes adorns his hall with goods plundered from nations throughout the earth. Yet God, the source of all virtues, adorns the earth with goodness to uphold all nations.
xxxHrothgar names his vaunting hall “Heorot” (the stag), an image of male virility as much it is of Nordic royalty. Like Scyld’s death ship, the hall is a tribute to Hrothgar’s own glory. And like the death ship, the lavishly adorned “horned hall” has its shadow side. Christianity vigorously reinterpreted horned images of pagan fertility into the horned emblem of Satan himself. And Hrothgar’s hall, built to overawe the “children of men,” is a “Tower of Babel” in its grandiosity and scale. Also like Babel, the hall is doomed to fall. The poet carefully balances the tension between triumph and disaster in the same alliterating line: “The hall towered high, its broad roof crowned with horn -- waiting for the surge of hate, waves of hungry fire.” This insider knowledge of eventual doom is, of course, not apparent to Hrothgar. The king of the Danes has built Heorot as a symbol of lasting power; what he does not know is that the hall will be destroyed when the Danes turn against each other.
xxxThe prediction of doom is also the shadow of death from which the phantom Grendel emerges, the embodiment of brother-killing evil perpetrated by the Danes themselves. Envy incited Cain to murder his brother. Envy incites the piracy of a marauding warrior culture. The monster is also a creature of envy -- goaded by the sound of joy, laughter in the hall, the song of Creation, the goodness of God’s world exemplified in kinship and gift-giving. Against the joys of Creation stands Grendel: a creature who waits in the outer darkness, who envies the joys possessed by other men.

Fitt II
“He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling.” xxxProverbs 26:27

xxxCircularity is a dominant principle in oral traditions: the witch is shoved in her own oven, the cruel stepsisters mutilate themselves, Rumplestilskin is undone by his arrogance, Midas by his greed. Biblical tradition reflects its oral heritage in Exodus when Pharoah’s edict to kill the first-born sons of Hebrews returns in the last, worst plague against the first-born sons of Egypt. Likewise, Grendel is not merely an early version of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon,” he embodies an evil perpetrated by the Danes themselves. Feared throughout Europe for their savagery, the Danes get a taste of their own warfare in Grendel, who lurks in the borderlands and ravages without mercy in the night, who refuses to make peace with his enemies. Grendel embodies a theological dimension also: He mirrors the spiritual “darkness” of the Danes, who in their pagan beliefs are “blind” to the redemptive knowledge of God.
xxxIn Grendel’s unrelenting attacks, Hrothgar meets his match. The “good” king of the Danes is as helpless against this mead-hall-wrecking scourge as Pharoah was against the plague of the first-born son. The great feast hall has become the setting for a ghoulish feast; the joyful dawn has become the hour of mourning. The suffering of the Danes is presented vividly, but not with unalloyed sympathy. This is, after all, a poet for whom perspective is everything, a poet who forces us to look at the underside of every bright surface. Even as the Danes suffer, he blends in the gall of shame. The mead-hall ravaging “Scyldings” are not so brave when their own mead hall is violated: They hide in the wake of Grendel’s assault. The great hall built to overawe “the children of men” is now a source of humiliation among “the children of men.” And Hrothgar’s loyal followers, who once sought gifts from the “ring-giving” hands of their warlord, can expect to find no “bright gifts” from Grendel’s bloody hands.
xxxGrendel also is viewed from two angles. In his case, horror is counterbalanced by pity. In heroic culture, the lordless, solitary warrior was a supremely tragic figure. A Christian reinterpretation of that convention is figured in Grendel’s tragic “lordlessness,” his wretched alienation from the supreme Lord, the God of Heaven and Earth. Grendel is the world’s first “evil” monster, the first embodiment of man’s own capacity for malice. Even more importantly, Grendel is the embodiment of evil as a state of wretchedness; he is the image of a man without faith, hope, or charity -- a man whose life is a living Hell, whose separation from God deprives him of joy. In this sense, Grendel’s naked solitude in the wasteland is a figure for Everyman, in that it recapitulates the potential wretchedness of all men (including the great Scyld Scefing, who arrives, and departs, as a “wretch,” naked and alone).
xxxGrendel’s misery also counterbalances the poet’s vigorous condemnation of pagan (materialist) culture. The poet reminds his audience that Scyld Scefing’s golden ship leaves him as “naked” as he came, that Hrothgar’s gold-plated hall is in fact doomed to fall. Nevertheless, the poet also affirms the joys of this world, the goodness of Creation. Here is no wholesale rejection of the flesh, but a celebration of the world and everything in it. Material objects, though not “good” in themselves, are “good” when used rightly, as gifts from God. And the feast is “good” too -- not as a rite of consumption, but as a gathering of brothers. In short, Grendel represents the the opposite of everything good in this world; his material and communal deprivation is itself a symptom of his alienation from God. As a being entirely lacking Godlike virtue (even those “pagan virtues” possessed by the Danes) Grendel’s evil creates a kind of “force.” The monster can invade Heorot at will; but he is so alien to the Creator God, he cannot even approach Hrothgar’s throne, the “seat of gift-giving.”
xxxIn desperation, the Danes pray to their idols. And here again Grendel mirrors the pagan culture he attacks. Just as Grendel does not know the Creator, the Danes also do not know God. The poet is emphatic: He underscores their spiritual ignorance by repeating the pronoun “they” (hie): “They knew not our Lord, Judge of our deeds. Nor did they know the Ruler of All. Indeed, they did not know the Helmet and Guardian of Heaven.” In the Book of Isaiah, when the prophet predicts the horror of captivity for the corrupted nation of Israel, God condemns their prayers: “When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” (Isaiah 1:15). Just so, the Danes are helpless against the scourge they face in Grendel, condemned by the very prayers they make. The poet pities the Danes, with the full understands that theirs is the lot of all men who are ignorant of the Revelation. Nevertheless, he is as unwavering as Isaiah in condemning their prayers: Like the monster who attacks them, the minds of the Danes are trapped apart from God, in Hell.

Fitt III
“For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high.” Isaiah 2: 12

xxxHrothgar’s impotence against Grendel sets the stage for Beowulf’s entrance. The hero is the strongest man in the world, and he is brave. He exemplifies the heroic virtues of leadership, strength, and courage. Nevertheless, the established pattern applies also to Beowulf. Like Scyld Scefing and Hrothgar, the hero has a shadow side.
xxxThe reader will note immediately that Beowulf enters without a name. He is introduced as “a thane of Hygelac,” as “a good man of the Geats.” Here is another key relationship in heroic culture: the bond between a thane and his lord. Just as ancestry defined a man, he was defined also by allegiance. Indeed, the vow of loyalty between a thane and his lord was a rite of “kinship” rather like the vows of marriage. And the giving of rings was not mere generosity, but a covenant between a man and his “ring-giving” lord. Just so, Beowulf, who remains unnamed for 150 lines, is defined by his bond with Hygelac.
xxxWho, then, is Hygelac? The man behind the legend appears in two historical accounts that have survived to our time—the most thorough of which was written by Gregory of Tours. Gregory was a sixth-century bishop who wrote the earliest authoritative chronicle of Frankish history. He describes Hygelac as a Nordic raider (a “Dane”) who attacked a Frankish kingdom ruled by a Christian king named Theuderic. In Gregory’s account Hygelac’s raid (c. 521) comes on the heels of Theuderic’s accession to the throne: Hygelac, who wastes a Christian realm and carries the innocent into captivity, is undeniably a 6th-century precursor to the waves of Nordic marauders who terrified Europe as “Vikings” in the 9th and 10th centuries. But we need not rely on Gregory of Tours to know that Hygelac is a “proto-Viking.” The infamous battle described by Gregory is one of the defining events in Beowulf. It is the one event in the last third of the poem that is alluded to in the first third of the poem; and it is the only event that is described from three different perspectives.
xxxTo understand the implications of Beowulf’s relationship to Hygelace, we must re-enter the world of Anglo-Saxon England. For a Christian king like Alfred, who had endured the ravages of Nordic armies, who would have known Hygelac as a “giant” in legend and as a Nordic raider in history, whose own father held sympathies with Christian France in its resistance to just such onslaughts, Beowulf’s national affiliation would have an ominous charge. The poet calls the hero “good” -- but is he really? In the Prologue, the word “good” was used with cautious ambiguity to describe Scyld Scefing (whose “goodness” in the eyes of men does not guarantee his “goodness” in the eyes of God). Later the word “good” was used with an ambiguous blend of pity and sarcasm to describe Hrothgar, “so long their good king” -- in the very depths of his travail. Beowulf’s identity as “a good man of the Geats” takes the irony even further: Is Beowulf a “good” man of the Geats (a good man living in an evil nation) or is he a “good man of the Geats” (a willing consort to their marauding warfare)? The historical perspective gives us the essential context. To understand who Beowulf is, we must understand that the phrase “good man of the Geats” would have sounded to Alfred and his court rather like the phrase “a good man of Atilla the Hun!”
xxxEnhancing our sense of Beowulf’s identity is the vivid depiction of armor. In a mirror image of Scyld’s death ship (with many verbal repetitions), Beowulf and his men load their ship with shining armor. The funereal shadow, however, is nearly obliterated in the bright light of heroic action. Where there was mourning and despair in Scyld Scefing’s death ship, now there is the vigor of action, the confidence of young men. As Beowulf and his comrades leave Geatland and enter the land of Danes, the poet emphasizes their gleaming gear. Indeed, throughout the entry section, the clattering and ringing of armor announces the power and might of Beowulf’s troop (rather like the marching of Roman soldiers in a Hollywood film).
xxxJust as the poem is energized in Beowulf’s heroic entry, it is also invigorated through form. As the hero enters the land of the Danes, the narrative shifts into active dramatic form with the forceful words of the Danish coastguard. For the first time a voice -- a sharply, angry voice -- is heard; and the form of the poem is pushed into another dimension. The effect is roughly analagous to the shift in “The Wizard of Oz” from a black-and-white Kansas to a colorful fairy realm. Now, it seems, the “real” story begins.
xxxThe question posed by the Danish watchman is interesting too. “What men are you?” The question is essentially the same as the famous opening line of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Who’s there?” Indeed, the audience still does not know “who” this “good man of the Geats” is. The question not only proposes the problem of identity (a theme shared by Beowulf and Hamlet), it also presents an irony. Alfred’s court would certainly have heard irony in the concern of a Danish watchman -- lest a hostile fleet invade their shores, lest enemies cross as spies through Danish lands (the Danes were known both for subterfuge and for military strength). Indeed, there is more than one account of an Anglo-Saxon coastguard who rushed to the shore to meet the Danes -- only to be killed by the Danes he went to greet. Readers may also note a comic touch in the shock of surprise when the coastguard lays eyes on Beowulf (who like his king is also a “giant”). xxxAltogether it is a fitting conclusion to what may have been the first night of the poem’s performance. Fitt III ends on a cliff-hanger: Beowulf and his men stand on the shore, threatened at spear point by the Danish coastguard.

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