Thread by @kentbanishearl

🧵Beowulf’s Christianity (prep-thread)

Most critics of the poem tend to present Beowulf as an essentially pagan work with some superficial Christian references sprinkled on top.

I believe the Christianity of the poem goes much deeper.

To be sure, the poem is complex and stratified.

The poem must be based on an old Danish legend, and correlates with other Norse Sagas we have, particularly Hrolf Kraki’s Saga.

There are also historical layers describing the beginnings of the migration period.

The historical strata of the poem was perhaps uniquely relevant to the Anglo Saxons, as it would have remembered their ancestors and their ancestors’ neighbors, with the Danes pushing the Jutes westward, similar to their southern cousins the Angles and the Saxons.

As a result the poem mixes mythical figures, such as King Beow, Beowulf, and Grendel, with semi-mythic people who were probably real in some form such as Scyld Scēfing, Hrothgar, and Hygelac.

It is however unquestionable that the author of our Beowulf poem was Christian, with frequent and thoughtful connections to scripture made throughout the poem. Some believe the author to have been a monk.

While we could point to elements of the poem as pagan, we should be careful not to confuse these elements for the poem itself.

Despite the poet clearly building off of an ancient Danish myth, the poem is not itself that ancient myth.

Tolkien particularly seemed eager to uncover the original Beowulf story which inspired the poem, going so far as to reconstruct a possible version in his Sellic Spell, published with his translation.

If we are too eager to isolate out one layer of the poem, we risk missing carefully constructed truths in the poem that we actually have. We must consider the work as a whole, on its own merits.

When considered in its current state, and not as a hypothetical reverse engineered legend, we can find Christian teachings in the poem which are profound and beautiful. The poet grappled with real challenges and gave us light for our own.

To that end, I will be preparing three threads:

1. The doctrinal themes of The Fall and Redemption built into the narrative.

2. The partnership between God and Hero.

3. Positive Fatalism.

This poem has much to offer for Christians who worry about a lack of vigor and vitality. The author shows a way to reconcile the hero to God. He redeems the pagan hero.