Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero, Heather O’Donoghue, Bloomsbury, £20

Beowulf is a poem steeped in mystery and otherness. It survives in only one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, named for its owner in the 16th century. The manuscript itself was fortunate to survive a fire that engulfed the library that housed it in 1731. Its edges are still charred and flaky: that’s how close it came. At over 3,000 lines, Beowulf is vastly longer than any other surviving work of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but there is no reference to it in any other text, nor any indication that a work like it – or other works comparable to it in achievement – ever existed. It was essentially unread, beyond a mere handful of scholars, for 900 years.

The poem’s author is unknown. That solitary manuscript, which is the work of two scribes, is evidently a copy, which probably dates to the early years of the 11th century. Scholars disagree on the date of the poem itself. One of the characters, the Geatish king Hygelac, from southern Sweden, who was almost certainly an identifiable historical figure, died in the sixth century in just the manner that the Beowulf poet describes, in a raid on the Franks. A theoretical date range of c. 550 to c.1015 is alarmingly wide, therefore, although dates at either extreme seem unlikely. Some scholars, meanwhile, have challenged the idea that there was a single author at all, arguing that the surviving text is simply one version of a poem that evolved in an oral culture over a long period of time and with many contributory voices.

For students of English literature, however, and readers more generally, the mystery has often been why they should be expected to read Beowulf at all. Woody Allen spoke for many when, in Annie Hall, he advised Diane Keaton never to take any course where they make you do so.

The poem recounts three ferocious, deadly battles between its hero and three monsters: Grendel, Grendel’s mother – both obscurely descended from Cain – and, leaping forwards 50 years, a dragon, which kills the now-aged Beowulf, too. The historical background to this is as murky and ill-defined as the watery, menacing moors and marshes that comprise the poem’s landscapes: Heather O’Donoghue – in Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero, her introduction to the poem for the Beowulf-curious – calls it ‘a Scandinavia of the mind’.

However you look at the poem, and despite the apparent simplicity of its story, you find ambivalence. It was written for a Christian audience – possibly by a monastic, O’Donoghue thinks – but reference to Christ and the promise of Christian salvation are scrupulously avoided. Its biblical references are to the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. The heroic world of the poem is ruled over by what O’Donoghue characterises as ‘a controlling deity compatible with, but not explicitly identified with, the Christian God’, who is typically referred to by words and phrases that echo Christian teaching while also keeping a kind of odd, ambiguous distance: lif-frea, ‘lord of life’, for instance, or wuldres wealdend, ‘ruler of glory’; also metod, ‘creator’ and  dryhten, ‘prince’. Some of these have parallels in Old Norse literature concerning pre-Christian deities: frea is the same word as Freyr; and metod is probably cognate with Mjötuðr, ‘the one who measures out human lives’. While these usages are by no means unusual in Anglo-Saxon Christian writing, the absence of explicit reference to the Christian narrative is. Only once does the mask really slip, when the author describes the Danes, after Grendel’s first assault, deserting Heorot and making pacts with the devil in their despair. Such behaviour was hæþenra hyht, he admonishes, the ‘hope of heathens’.

This unsettling sense of indeterminacy runs throughout the poem. No sooner are we introduced to the great new Danish mead hall of Heorot, central to the first two narrative sections of the poem, than we are told that it will burn to the ground. We meet the Geatish king Hygelac only to learn that he is destined to be killed in battle. The human world is tied together through networks of family and kinship – as is that of what scholars call the Grendelkin, of course – but those networks are fraught and untrustworthy. Brothers kill each other, intentionally and otherwise; cousins fight for power. After Beowulf defeats Grendel, the Danish king Hrothgar seems to adopt him as his heir while his nephew, Hrothulf, another possible claimant, looks on; there is ‘as yet still peace between them’, the poet says knowingly.

Geats, Heathobards, Swedes, Danes, Frisians and others: all are locked into cycles of hostility and vengeance. Just as the existence of loyalty implies the existence of treachery, so victory implies defeat. What is built will be destroyed. Greatness is fleeting. When, at the close of the poem, Beowulf’s body is burnt on a funeral pyre the pagan ceremony is described in poignant detail, but in the end Heofon rece swell, ‘heaven swallows the smoke’ and the treasure in his burial mound lies unnyt, ‘useless’, just as it was when it formed the dragon’s hoard.

These narrative elements are tightly interlaced, looking back into histories beyond the present of the narrative, and looking forward, with foreboding, to the histories that will follow. The language, too, is remarkable for its intricacy, and for both its concision and its resistance to definitive interpretation. Lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry are made up of two half lines, typically of two or three words each, yoked together through alliteration. But the text of Beowulf is strikingly spare and allusive; the Anglo-Saxon technique of variation, in which subject matter is repeated with subtle movements in meaning, creates space for just the kind of ambiguity that the poem exhibits at a narrative level. Phrases and meanings overlap, and the effect is amplified by the widespread absence of ‘small words’ – pronouns, prepositions, articles – which would otherwise clarify the uneasy shifting relationship between language and sense. Compound words are a feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but Beowulf is particularly dense with them. Grendel is a mearcstapa – a ‘borderland-wanderer’ – for example, whose attack on Heorot causes Hrothgar hreþerbealo, ‘heart-misery’. As O’Donoghue notes, these compounds ‘reduce the number of words used, but expand the range of meanings by leaving the precise way in which they relate to each other unspecified’.

O’Donoghue’s aim in Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero is ostensibly simple but actually very difficult: to convey all this complexity and art in the poem for a non-specialist audience. She sidesteps the kind of extra-textual questions of date and authorship that have consumed so much scholarship and writes with a reassuring directness and authority, dispensing with footnotes altogether. ‘I won’t translate or anglicize proper names,’ she explains, ‘for the reason that I prefer it that way’; ‘the technicalities of some published works are often incomprehensible even to other Old English scholars’, she notes. Indeed, she describes her task in notably modest terms: the book, she suggests, ‘is essentially little more than a very close reading’. This is a touch disingenuous: the book is a tour de force of accessible scholarship, bringing what is arguably the most forbidding text in English literary history to life in all its supple, dark complexity.

I think the highest praise I can give O’Donoghue is that I finished her book and immediately ordered George Jack’s student edition of the poem on her recommendation. Like a lot of people, I avoided Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon at university. It’s time to make amends.