Beowulf

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem of 3,182 alliterative lines, the longest surviving work of Old English literature and one of the foundational texts of the English literary tradition. The poem narrates the heroic career of the Geatish warrior Beowulf, who crosses the sea to aid the Danish king Hrothgar, whose great mead-hall Heorot has been terrorized for twelve years by the monster Grendel. After killing Grendel and then Grendel's vengeful mother in an underwater lair, Beowulf returns home in triumph, eventually becomes king of the Geats, and reigns for fifty years before facing his final battle — a dragon enraged by the theft of a cup from its ancient treasure hoard. The aged king kills the dragon but dies of his wounds, and the poem ends with his funeral pyre and an elegy for a vanishing heroic world.

Beowulf occupies a unique cultural position as a poem composed by a Christian author about a pagan Germanic past. The poem is pervasively Christian in its worldview — God (called variously the Christian God, Metod 'the Measurer,' Ealwalda 'Almighty Lord,' and Drihten 'Lord') is referenced throughout as the sovereign power behind events — yet the story it tells is set in pagan Scandinavia among people who worship at heathen temples. The poet looks back on the pre-Christian world with elegy and genuine sympathy, not condemnation, producing a document of extraordinary cultural complexity.

The poem was not widely known until the Danish scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin published the first printed edition in 1815, but it has since become one of the most studied and translated works in English literary history, inspiring poets from Tennyson to Seamus Heaney and scholars from Tolkien (who wrote the pivotal 1936 critical essay 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics') to the present day.

• Genesis 4:1-16
• Genesis 6:1-8
• Romans 2:14-15
• Matthew 6:19-21
• Proverbs 11:2
• Proverbs 16:18
• 1 Peter 3:18-20

Tolkien's 1936 essay 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics' essentially created modern Beowulf studies by arguing that critics had missed the point — the monsters were the poem's greatest achievement, not an embarrassing primitive survival, because they gave the hero something worthy to fight against while embodying the existential darkness that threatens all human civilization.