Three Monsters, One Burnt Manuscript: A First Reader's Guide to Beowulf

In Beowulf, a young warrior from the Geats sails to Denmark to help King Hrothgar, whose great mead hall Heorot has been raided by the monster Grendel for twelve years. Beowulf kills Grendel with his bare hands, then kills Grendel's mother when she comes for revenge. He goes home, becomes king of the Geats, and fifty years later fights a dragon; he kills it but is mortally wounded, and his people burn his body and raise a burial mound by the sea in his memory. That is the whole story in brief. What makes the poem worth knowing is everything around those three fights: who wrote it, how a single fire-damaged copy survived, what the hero's world of lords, gifts and feuds looked like, and why a poem in a language most English speakers cannot read is still being translated, taught and retold.

What kind of work is it?

Beowulf is an Old English poem, an epic in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend, made up of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. "Old English" here means the language of the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest, so different from modern English that most readers need a translation. Although it is one of the founding texts of English literature, the story is not set in England at all. It takes place in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries, and almost all of its characters are Danes, Geats and Swedes.

The poem blends fiction, legend, myth and history. The hero Beowulf himself appears in no other Old English manuscript, but many other people in the poem, such as King Hrothgar and his family, turn up in Scandinavian sources. One event, a raid by Beowulf's lord King Hygelac into Frisia, is even mentioned by the 6th-century historian Gregory of Tours and can be dated to around 521. So the poem's monsters walk through a world that is partly real, on a map of Scandinavia that early readers would have recognised.

Who wrote it, and when?

Nobody knows. Scholars simply call the anonymous author "the Beowulf poet". The date is just as uncertain. The only firm date belongs to the manuscript, which was produced between about AD 975 and 1025. The poem itself may be older: J. R. R. Tolkien and a number of later scholars argued for the 8th century, others have proposed the 890s and the court of King Alfred, and some think the poem as we have it may be close in date to its 11th-century manuscript. Scholars also argue about where it was composed and whether it was passed down orally before it was written. The traditional picture is of a singer-poet, a scop, chanting it to the music of a harp, but some modern scholars see it as written literature that borrowed from oral tradition.

The story of the manuscript is almost a small adventure of its own. The poem survives in a single copy, in a book now called the Nowell Codex after the 16th-century scholar Laurence Nowell. It has no title there; we name it after its hero. In 1731 a fire swept through Ashburnham House in London, where Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval manuscripts was kept. The codex survived, but its edges were charred and some words were lost. Two different scribes copied it, and the change in handwriting is visible after line 1939. Today the codex is in the British Library. An Icelandic scholar, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, made transcriptions of it in 1786, and because the pages have crumbled further since then, those copies now help scholars recover letters that have disappeared.

The story in brief

Grendel and the hall of joy. The poem opens with the funeral of Scyld Scefing, a legendary founder of the Danish royal line, and then turns to his descendant Hrothgar, who builds the magnificent hall Heorot for himself and his warriors. Night after night they sing and celebrate inside. Grendel, a monstrous creature said to descend from the biblical Cain, is tormented by the sound of their joy. He attacks the hall and devours warriors in their sleep, and the helpless Danes abandon it. A mead hall like Heorot was the heart of an early Germanic lord's world, a large single-room building where he lived with his retainers, received visitors and gathered his community. A monster in the hall is a monster at the centre of society.

The fight without weapons. Beowulf hears of the trouble and, with his own king's permission, sails to Denmark. He refuses to use a weapon, because he considers himself Grendel's equal. When Grendel enters and kills one of his men, Beowulf, who has been pretending to sleep, seizes the monster's hand. His men's swords cannot cut Grendel's skin, but Beowulf tears off Grendel's arm at the shoulder. The monster flees to the marshes and dies, and the arm is hung up in Heorot for everyone to see.

A mother's revenge. The next night Grendel's mother comes for revenge, kills Hrothgar's most trusted adviser, Æschere, and escapes. Beowulf tracks her to her lair beneath a lake, dives in, and fights her in an underwater cave. The borrowed sword Hrunting fails him, and she nearly kills him, but he spots a huge old sword made for giants hanging on the wall and cuts off her head. He also beheads Grendel's corpse; the blade melts in the monster's hot blood, leaving only the hilt. Hrothgar rewards him richly and gives him a long speech of advice, sometimes called "Hrothgar's sermon", about the dangers of pride.

The dragon. Beowulf returns home and eventually becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later a slave steals a golden cup from a dragon's hoard, and the furious dragon burns the land. The old king insists on fighting it alone, but he is outmatched. His men run into the woods in fear; only the young warrior Wiglaf comes to help. Together they kill the dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded. The poem begins and ends with a funeral, Scyld's at the start and Beowulf's at the close.

The people in the poem

Beowulf is the hero of the Geats, a people from what is now southern Sweden, and the poem shows him at two ages: the young champion who travels abroad to prove his strength, and the old king who must protect his own people. Tolkien thought that this division between young and old Beowulf was the poem's basic structure. Hrothgar is the ageing Danish king, generous and wise but unable to defend his own hall. His queen, Wealhtheow, presides over the celebrations in Heorot. Unferth is the warrior who first challenges Beowulf's reputation and later lends him the sword Hrunting.

Grendel is the poem's most famous monster, a dark, lonely figure drawn to the hall by the sound of happiness he cannot share. His mother is in some ways more frightening, because her violence has a recognisable human motive: revenge for a son. The dragon, finally, guards a buried treasure that is useless to it, a symbol of greed that the old king has to face. And Wiglaf, whose name means "remnant of valour", is the loyal follower who shows what a true retainer should be when everyone else has run away.

What the poem is about

Loyalty between lord and warrior. Beowulf depicts a Germanic warrior society in which the bond between a lord and the men who served him mattered above everything else. Lords give treasure, rings and weapons; warriors repay them with courage. When Beowulf's men abandon him before the dragon, Wiglaf bitterly reproaches them, because they have broken the whole system that holds this world together.

Pagan heroes, Christian poet. The characters are Germanic pagans, yet the poem was written down by Christian Anglo-Saxons whose ancestors had converted around the 7th century. This creates a famous puzzle. Grendel is descended from Cain and the poem alludes to Genesis, Exodus and Daniel, but its heroes live by fame, vengeance and gold. Scholars still debate whether it is a Christian work set in a pagan past, a pagan story lightly retouched, or something genuinely in between.

Feuds and the fall of houses. Running behind the monster fights are long "digressions" about wars between Swedes and Geats and other old quarrels. Early critics thought they interrupted the story, but more recent readers see them as deliberate comparisons, and some argue that the poem is really about how cycles of vengeance destroy families and kingdoms. That gives the ending its sadness: with Beowulf dead, his people face an uncertain future.

Elegy more than adventure. In a famous 1936 lecture, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien argued that scholars had been so busy mining the poem for history that they had overlooked its power as poetry. He said the nearest label for it was not epic but elegy, a lament, and that its focus is the closing dirge. Read that way, Beowulf is a poem about the shortness of glory as much as about killing monsters.

How it sounds

Old English poets used alliterative verse. Each line is split into two halves by a pause, and the halves are linked by words that begin with the same sound, rather than by rhyme at the end of the line. Poets also used kennings, short poetic descriptions of ordinary things: the sea might be the "swan's riding" and a king a "ring-giver". This tight form makes translation hard, yet there are hundreds of versions. By 2020 one database listed some 688 translations and other versions of the poem, and it has been translated into at least 38 languages. Seamus Heaney's 1999 verse translation is one of the best known, and Tolkien himself worked on translations of his own.

If you want to start reading, pick a modern verse translation and read the Grendel fight first, then the underwater battle, then the dragon. Try reading a few lines aloud, too, so you can hear the heavy beats and repeated opening sounds that held the lines together when the poem was performed.

Learn with Beowulf: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
mead hall	a lord's great feasting hall; now any lively gathering place	The old pub was the village's mead hall.
kenning	a short poetic phrase naming something indirectly	"Whale-road" is a kenning for the sea.
ring-giver	a generous lord or leader (kenning)	The founder was the team's ring-giver.
a dragon's hoard	wealth jealously guarded and never used	He sits on his savings like a dragon's hoard.
to slay a monster	to defeat a huge problem	We finally slew the monster of old paperwork.

Try this: Invent two kennings of your own for everyday objects (for example, "screen-glow" for a phone) and use each in an English sentence.