Yay, even more Tolkien ! Because why the hell not ?
This time it's his 1936 lecture-essay Beowulf : The Monsters And The Critics. I'm afraid in my last encounter with the much-loved Beowulf poem, I committed a grievous error. I said that Beowulf was just pure entertainment, damn finely-crafted entertainment, but nothing at all sophisticated. At it's core, it's about a great big strapping man who beats up monsters. Sounds simple enough. Pretty much nobody objects to great big strapping men beating up monsters. It's been good solid family fun for thousands of years.
Tolkien, ever wiser, convincingly suggests that there's a lot more to it than that. As with On Fairy-Stories (see previous two posts), his lecture has broad-ranging implications, both for Tolkien's' own creations and for the significance of mythology in general.
The Critics
Simply put, many erudite and learned critics have argued much as I have, that Beowulf is a hero who fights monsters and that's all there is to it. "There is nothing much in the story... The hero is occupied in killing monsters... Beowulf has nothing else to do", says one, noting that the Greek heroes did plenty of other things besides. This would be a tale told by a poet, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing !
The anti-fantasy bias even affects the study of mythology. It, "'puts the irrelevances [the monsters] in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges", says another, suggesting it needs more about the character and his quest for revenge instead of "a wilderness of dragons".
Tolkien deplores all this as missing the fucking point. He doesn't suggest that it's actually a work of staggering complexity – it isn't – but he does suggest there's a great deal more subtlety at work than the critics suppose. Rather than dissecting every individual action that happens, he says that the "special virtue" of the poem, "resides, one might guess, in the theme, and the spirit this has infused into the whole". The author deliberately made it all about monsters for a damn good reason, not just because monsters are exciting. The monsters and the hero alike, the major themes, have deep significance, just not in the usual way the literary-minded critics were expecting*.
* The only other remotely comparable work I've read, in terms of its contemporary setting, is Njal's Saga. I'm sure the critics love it but I found it mostly torturous and dull.
In fact, Tolkien says in what I assume is a moment of getting quite carried away with himself, Beowulf is "not an epic" at all and even, "we must not view this poem as in intention an exciting narrative or a romantic tale."
Ooo....kaaay....
Here I think he patently goes too far, for the extraordinarily simple reason that the tale clearly is terribly dramatic – and romantic, in the tragic-hero sense. It beggars belief that so skilled a poet could accidentally have written it so. It's possible Tolkien is using the words in an odd, technical sense here, at least as far as "epic" goes. And whether he personally finds the tale exciting or not doesn't affect the rest of the analysis, nor do the excitement and simplicity of the main events detract from any deeper significance they may hold. Rather the reverse.
The Myth
Why does the poet have his hero fight monsters then ? Precisely because of their otherworldly nature, says Tolkien. This is what gives the poem the elevated status of the mythological, beyond mere drama. Tolkien begins by summarising several key qualities for capturing a sense of the mythic. One of his favourite points, judging by both the History of Middle Earth and On Fairy-Stories, is the need to create a sense of depth, of distance from the reader not merely in space or time but in something more fundamental, of being in a realm not only distant to but different from our own.
The whole must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet's contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance — a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground... it used knowledge of these things for its own purpose — to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind.
The sense of the other-worldly is what gives mythic tales an ineffable quality that is absent from other stories. For me at least a horror story about a creature of the darkness is so much more interesting, so much more disturbing, than the ones about axe murderers than the like. I'm always disappointed when, in Predator (excellent movie though it is), the mysterious occurrences are explained as nothing more than an invisible alien. This operates on known and knowable rules; it becomes predictable, and though the film remains a first-rate action movie beyond that point, something is lost. By contrast, supernatural horror retains a greater sense of threat even when the cause and purpose of the danger is revealed.
The sense of creating a feeling of mystery, something that cannot be understood even by the author, is crucial to myth as well :
The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done.
Which is worth bearing in mind. Elsewhere Tolkien ascribes a motivation and reasoning to the poet which I suspect describes Tolkien himself more than the original author, but the intention of capturing that which is "indescribable, though not imperceptible" is plausible. Of course this is how we usually think of myths, as trying to explain the inexplicable, resulting in sometimes strange, bizarre stories that are nevertheless relevant in helping us to understand ourselves.
The Monsters
Clearly if the poet wants to create this mythological effect, he cannot very well have Beowulf fight "some Swedish prince". I think this point is arguable. Would Achilles feel less mythological and more merely legendary if the gods were excised from The Iliad ? Possibly – but not necessarily, if his attributes were sufficiently enhanced. Which of course they were, with his feats of arms clearly superhuman rather than merely extraordinary. That said, in the space available, by far the easiest and probably the most satisfying option available to the poet of Beowulf is to make the whole thing about the monsters. Tolkien bluntly dismisses the idea of having less monsters as "nonsense" :
I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf's rise to fame in a 'typical' or 'commonplace' war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a 'wild' or 'trivial' Swedish invasion !
Beowulf faces a series of adversaries. If he starts by being pitted against plausible villains then he is immediately established as an fundamentally ordinary hero tackling basically ordinary problems*, and to then bring in supernatural entities would feel distinctly strange (it would be possible to do this, I think, but not in the space available). The reverse would be even worse : to start with a monster and then revert to normality is a massive anti-climax. So instead we get a series of increasingly difficult challenges, fundamentally unrealistic but narratively satisfying. And realism in myth, is, as I've said previously, an inherently bad idea, something that should be deliberately avoided at all costs**. Tolkien continues :
* Beowulf and the Photocopier of Doom, anyone ?
** That is, obviously, for the core difference between that world and reality. Other attributes can and probably should be allowed to be more familiar.
If the dragon is the right end for Beowulf, and I agree with the author that it is, then Grendel is an eminently suitable beginning. They are creatures, feond mancynnes, [foes of mankind] of a similar order and kindred significance. Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental. And the conquest of the ogres comes at the right moment : not in earliest youth... but in that first moment, which often comes in great lives, when men look up in surprise and see that a hero has unawares leaped forth. The placing of the dragon is inevitable: a man can but die upon his death-day.
Grendel is established as a foe of unnatural quality by so easily consuming Hrothgar's presumably otherwise-competent warriors, thus giving Beowulf a chance to shine as the monster's counterpart. Similarly, having the dragon at the end enhances the stature of both Beowulf and his greatest adversary — particularly as the dragon actually succeeds in killing Beowulf. Tolkien notes that dragons are used extremely sparingly in northern literature for good reason :
A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men's imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold.
Apparently the dark age authors were able to prevent any sort of inflation with what must surely have been a huge temptation... dragons are marvellous villains, so why not add more ? Because then they have to either become easier to defeat, which cheapens their worth, or they just win, which would be pointless. All well and good, but Tolkien even has the audacity to suggest that there are in fact only two dragons of any significance : Beowulf's bane, and Fáfnir . That's something to which no self-respecting Welshman could ever agree*.
* Likewise, when in the History of Middle Earth, he describes how the English should be the ones having the "correct" fairy mythology (to the deliberate slight of the Celtic nations**), and when he elsewhere complains bitterly about the most minor and unimportant of changes suggested by others while himself freely doing away with hundreds of pages of his own text with the mere slip of a pen.... I couldn't help but feel that on occasion – and just on occasion mind you – Tolkien was as capable of the rest of us of being a massive twat.
** Christopher Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales Volume II, p. 290 : "the Irish and the Welsh tell garbled things... a specifically English fairy-lore is born, and one more true than anything to be found in Celtic lands."
The Religion
But if the monsters are narratively necessary for creating a sense of myth, what do they represent ? Demons, says Tolkien. He claims that this is one of the main points to the story, that it is written by a fully-fledged Christian writer, not someone existing in a muddled combination of Christianity and paganism.
The monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness. The key to the fusion-point of imagination that produced this poem lies, therefore, in those very references to Cain which have often been used as a stick to beat an ass — taken as an evident sign (were any needed) of the muddled heads of early Anglo-Saxons.
And quoting with approval an earlier critic :
The gigantic foes whom Beowulf has to meet are identified with the foes of God. Grendel and the dragon are constantly referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness with which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They are the 'inmates of Hell', 'adversaries of God', 'offspring of Cain', 'enemies of mankind'... Beowulf, for all that he moves in the world of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight.
Beowulf is fighting the forces of darkness and evil in ways which the Greek heroes, Tolkien notes, never do. Their gods and monsters serve quite different roles. Tolkien is convinced the poet is a full-blooded Christian, but that the monsters are still in development : Grendel is not quite fully demonic, but is a step in that direction.
There's a lot to unpack there, so let's start with the monsters. What would a monster have to do to constitute a true demon ? According to Tolkien it would have to corrupt and destroy the soul, something Grendel and the dragon stop short of. Pagan cultures did include non-corporeal aspects but this is not present here, perhaps further evidence for the Christianity of the author.
Doubtless ancient pre-Christian imagination vaguely recognized differences of 'materiality' between the solidly physical monsters, conceived as made of the earth and rock (to which the light of the sun might return them), and elves, and ghosts or bogies. Monsters of more or less human shape were naturally liable to development on contact with Christian ideas of sin and spirits of evil. Their parody of human form becomes symbolical, explicitly, of sin, or rather this mythical element, already present implicit and unresolved, is emphasized: this we see already in Beowulf, strengthened by the theory of descent from Cain (and so from Adam), and of the curse of God.
Because of his [Grendel's] ceaseless hostility to men, and hatred of their joy, his superhuman size and strength, and his love of the dark, he approaches to a devil, though he is not yet a true devil in purpose. Real devilish qualities (deception and destruction of the soul), other than those which are undeveloped symbols, such as his hideousness and habitation in dark forsaken places, are hardly present... he is not when wrestling with Beowulf a materialized apparition of soul-destroying evil.
Grendel was a fleshly denizen of this world (until physically slain)... Grendel remains primarily an ogre, a physical monster, whose main function is hostility to humanity (and its frail efforts at order and art upon earth)... The dragon wields a physical fire, and covets gold, not souls; he is slain with iron in his belly.
So the connection to Cain points to an evolution in thinking of monsters as being demonic, but the development was as yet far from completed. They have a sinister quality lacking in the Greek monsters, and, crucially, while Grendel "bore God's wrath", "the Cyclops is god-begotten and his maiming is an offence against his begetter, the god Poseidon". The monsters of Beowulf, as in Norse myth, present a threat (if only implicit and not fully developed) to the whole world order; the monsters in Greek myth are themselves part of the world order, as natural as anything else. Conversely Beowulf, says Tolkien, is no less than God's solution to the problem of those monsters. These two powerful opposing forces fulfil different roles to the heroes and monsters of the Greeks.
But I think Tolkien is perhaps a little too obstinate in insisting that there is no "muddled thinking" of the poet here, too eager to defend his Christianity. As mentioned, I think he is perhaps reading himself into the author's mindset :
So far from being a man so simple or so confused that he muddled Christianity with Germanic paganism, the author probably drew or attempted to draw distinctions, and to represent moods and attitudes of characters conceived dramatically as living in a noble but heathen past.
This is possible. We should allow that a mind capable of constructing a poem of such "metrical art, style, [and] verbal skill" (Tolkien puts him on par with Milton), whatever era in which he writes, is also thinking deeply about the issues described, and of wanting to create a similar tale of a semi-imagined past as modern fantasy authors, for similar motivations. But can we really say anything about whether the author (or his audience) genuinely believed in a mix of paganism and Christianity ? I think no, and it doesn't matter all that much. The author has incorporated aspects of his own culture, as anyone must do. Reinterpreting, reimagining the mythical tales within a relatively new Christian lens is in no sense "muddled" thinking : rather he has come up with a new explanation for monsters. Tolkien expresses a better view of this synthesis and incorporation, I think, elsewhere :
The criticism that the important matters are put on the outer edges misses this point of artistry, and indeed fails to see why the old things have in Beowulf such an appeal : it is the poet himself who made antiquity so appealing. His poem has more value in consequence, and is a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil.
Now possibly if he'd had Jesus fighting Odin, that would constitute muddled thinking, trying to combine fundamentally incompatible beliefs. But even then perhaps not, if Odin had been reduced to a status of a prophet or an angel. And even if he had, does that detract from anything ? No. Not if there was some valuable symbolism as to the nature of the world or human morality. I agree with Tolkien that there is no semblance of "muddled thinking" here, but I don't agree with have to assume the poet is "fully Christian" in the modern sense. Nor need we assume the audience was at similar level; the poet might have been a genius writing for a bunch of backward yokels who believed in all kinds of supernatural nonsense, or writing for like-minded intellectuals – neither scenario takes away any value from the poem.
There are however fundamental aspects to the ancient religions which were incompatible :
The [Greek] ruling gods are not besieged, not in ever-present peril or under future doom. The gods are not the allies of men in their war against these or other monsters. The interest of the gods is in this or that man as part of their individual schemes, not as part of a great strategy that includes all good men, as the infantry of battle. In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness. They gather heroes for the last defence.
This may make the southern gods more godlike — more lofty, dread, and inscrutable. They are timeless and do not fear death. Such a mythology may hold the promise of a profounder thought. [But]... in a sense it had shirked the problem precisely by not having the monsters in the centre — as they are in Beowulf to the astonishment of the critics. It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.
Beowulf thus faces a threat, or at least the beginnings of one, more terrible than anything Jason or Achilles or Odysseus had to contend with. And that the monsters can ultimately win, that there is no divine solution given to Beowulf to aid or rescue him, is perhaps the poem's most important theme.
The Hero
Key to this is that Beowulf ultimately dies. The easiest, noblest interpretation of this is that Beowulf does what he knows to be right even at the cost of his own life. Unlike other heroes he is not rewarded with immortality on this earthly plane, not granted any special exemption : he simply dies, as he was always going to, being anyway elderly at this point. Yet he fights the dragon nonetheless.
He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy... this paradox of defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged, [is] its full significance.
Tolkien suggests a bittersweet interpretation of the poem, which I can't say I much like. If the poet was indeed a fully modern Christian, he says :
One thing he knew clearly : those days were heathen — heathen, noble, and hopeless...
Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man's precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable Victory of death.
[Beowulf's] funeral is not Christian, and his reward is the recognized virtue of his kingship and the hopeless sorrow of his people... Within the limits of human life Beowulf neither lived nor died in vain — brave men might say. But there is no hint, indeed there are many to the contrary, that it was a war to end war, or a dragon-fight to end dragons. It is the end of Beowulf, and of the hope of his people.
This doesn't so much sound bittersweet as simply bitter ! I can't agree with it. Yet while Beowulf accomplishes nothing so grand as defeating paganism, there is still a moral lesson here, and a very powerful one at that (even neglecting the possibility of an eternal afterlife, which Tolkien little mentions) :
'The Northern Gods', Ker said, 'have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason' — mythologically, the monsters — 'but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.' And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this 'absolute resistance, perfect because without hope'.
Which could be lifted straight out of The Lord of the Rings, the idea that if a task must be attempted, then the attempt must be made regardless of the chance of success; even victory of the enemy does not prove the rightness of their cause. Beowulf is a hero not because of his feats of arms but because he fights a battle he knows he cannot win, that the only solution is "naked will and courage". I don't agree that the death of Beowulf represents the end of hope, because after all the dragon is slain. Of course the audience mourns the passing of a hero, but the hero has achieved his purpose, quite unlike the earlier, more pagan stories :
The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, hæleð under heofenum [heroes under heaven], remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come.
This would be a better argument, I think, in favour of the poet being fully Christian. The monsters do not win here. Beowulf fights until death, not defeat. As Tolkien elaborates, the stories evolve over time until the earthly defeat is rendered impotent :
It is no defeat, for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, the Arbiter who is above the mortal world. Beyond there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of the þyrsas [giants] and sigel-hearwan* of heathen imagination.
* I cannot find a straightforward explanation of this term, but it seems to have something to do with Ethiopian balrogs !
Here Tolkien becomes I think himself confused. His following prose is beautiful, but seems quite clearly to say that the author was "muddling" pagan and Christian myth despite his earlier, vocal protestations that this is not the case; now he implies that the poet was after all unwittingly mixing older and more contemporary values, even the very story itself :
The plot was not the poet's; and though he has infused feeling and significance into its crude material, that plot was not a perfect vehicle of the theme or themes that came to hidden life in the poet's mind as he worked upon it.
We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair. He could view from without, but still feel immediately and from within, the old dogma : despair of the event, combined with faith in the value of doomed resistance.
But no matter. What matters is that the great theme of the poem is mortality and how central this is to the world view of the poet and his audience. In no small part the poem reflects a changing view of the nature of reality. It is not necessary, not in the slightest, that Beowulf's death be so utterly hopeless for it still to be full charged of poignancy.
The World
Unconcerned with the pettiness of the details of human life, Beowulf seeks to explore greater themes of our own mortal nature – nothing less, at times, than our place in the cosmos. Tolkien rejects "that judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior". If I was looking for vindication of my thesis that Tolkien's own works achieve their emotional power by providing a connection between small and cosmic-scale processes, his Monsters and the Critics essay provides the strongest, most direct evidence of this line of thinking I've yet come across.
He who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms 'heroes under heaven', or 'mighty men upon earth', but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky's inaccessible roof; whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this 'geography', once held as a material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little. It transcends astronomy. Not that astronomy has done anything to make the island seem more secure or the outer seas less formidable.
It's a running theme in The History of Middle-Earth that Christopher Tolkien is quite clear his father was being literal when I would normally have assumed he was being metaphorical; a sword that "shone with white flame" should be envisaged by the reader as really doing so. Here too this is evident. "Heroes under heaven", as least in Tolkien's view (and again he may be reading himself into the author) is not intended as metaphor but a literal description, or at the very least, it gives significance to the tale by invoking the cosmic. The reader or listener is deliberately made to recall these much grander themes in relation to the otherwise smaller, more worldly events.
It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than this imaginary poem of a great king's fall. It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts — lixte se leoma ofer landa fela — and there is a sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.
One wonders if this has any bearing on the music of the Ainur, but perhaps that's a step too far. But the point stands. Even if the poet accidentally hit on a successful trick, this cosmological context is crucial in elevating the poem from a tale, however well-told, of a big strapping man fighting enemies (however inhuman), into something truly mythic, something with that ineffable quality that marks a story as "a product of thought and deep emotion", something that resonates deep within the human psyche.
Conclusions
And to think the monsters were called "irrelevances" ! This is both wrong and backwards. Backwards, because the monsters, the supernatural aspects, are the most important part of the story, and wrong, because nothing is truly irrelevant. The character of Beowulf does matter, just not as much as the forces he contends with.
This way of thinking is not consigned to a hopelessly-snobbish literary elite. I remember in primary school shortly after Jurassic Park was released that a classmate (all of us aged around 10 at the time) said that she didn't like it because it's got no story. I was aghast. Little me thought that exploring how dinosaurs and people might interact was quite interesting enough, thank you; slightly older me realised that the story also cautions against capitalism and the need for respecting the power of science. This is not an unimportant tale at all : in the modern, technology-based world it could hardly be more important, and not a whole mountain of Mr Darcys can compete with the impact of a single velociraptor. They'd be torn to pieces, literally and figuratively.
Even one of my best friends maintains that Jurassic Park is memorable because of the characters. Well, I suppose they have their role to play in exploring the different attitudes to genetic engineering, and at least we're not caught up in the pointless intricacies of their love lives. But it's very much the monsters in the centre of this one, and anything else is catastrophically missing the point.
Mythology does not have a monopoly on morality, however. Nor does speculative fiction more generally have any especial claim on profound insight or emotional resonance; it is perfectly possible to be deeply moved by a story set entirely in familiar surroundings. But speculative fiction does claim a unique status on the type of exploration it permits. How we are shaped by our place in the cosmos and our mortality, how we would fare with different lifespans, how we would and should behave in different realities... these are hardly the only valid forms of literary exploration. But they are, I think, the greatest and most important, and a bunch of squabbling East Ender's or the lord of some country mansion alike are utterly insignificant compared with the power of the Force, and do not hold a candle compared to the prospects of a post-scarcity economy, time travel, or demonic foes astride the earth.
All that being true, I'm still wary of reading too much into things. Beowulf still could be viewed as a story about a great big strapping man who fights monsters. To see only the surface level and be enthralled by it is nothing shameful. And perhaps the author never really intended anything more than that, although that seems unlikely : to have the demons lurking in the darkness described as the spawn of Cain, and to have the heroes referred to in heavenly terms, is really too much for such a well-crafted work to be the result of accident. But even if we grant this possibility, the analysis is still fascinating. We are not compelled to take everything literally. The last words, of course, belong to Tolkien.
And the pretence that all prayers are answered, and swiftly, would scarcely have deceived the stupidest member of his audience. Had he embarked on such bad theology, he would have had many other difficulties to face... indeed His permission of the assaults of Grendel at all upon such a Christian people, who do not seem depicted as having perpetrated any crime punishable by calamity. But in fact God did provide a cure for Grendel — Beowulf. He could hardly have been less aware than we that in history, and in Scripture, people could depart from the one God to other service in time of trial — precisely because that God has never guaranteed to His servants immunity from temporal calamity, before or after prayer. It is to idols that men turned (and turn) for quick and literal answers.
