There is a story about a book that is often talked about among scholars of medieval literature.
The story occurred on the night of 23 October 1731, almost three hundred years ago when a tragedy struck in Ashburnham House in England. It was then that a fire consumed many great pieces of ancient literature.
As fortune would have it, not among those that burned was what today has come to be the only surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf. Legend tells that someone had the foresight to throw the priceless manuscript out of the window, thus saving it from the fire. Even so, none can deny that Beowulf was moments away from being destroyed by the flames.
The manuscript, however, was not wholly left undamaged. The edges were badly burned, the corners scorched, and while the words survived, the paper on which they are written is brittle and has only been preserved with extreme care.
The fame of this story among Beowulf scholars cannot be denied. What no one seems to talk about though is the deep irony this chance happening holds. Beowulf, after all, is a tale haunted by fire. Foretold in its outset is a future in which all that the dwellers of the tale seek to protect has been consumed by a mortal fire. Furthermore, the tale's teller, who in Beowulf looks back on a time and age now over, seeks to keep alive what has been destroyed.
How incredibly ironic it is that he almost failed because of a fire.
Still, the legendary tale of Beowulf the dragon slayer remain embedded like deep roots into literature, there mostly un-reached by the frosts of time.
How deep those roots go, no one knows. Indeed, no one can tell for certain the source of this epic tale or its origins. The legends of Beowulf the monster slayer have not survived by mistake, no doubt. But though the manuscript which was so nearly lost to us survives, we do not really know where it comes from. Even its original author remains unknown to us.
Yet the narrator speaks vividly throughout the tale, moving through time as Beowulf grows old and eventually dies, vanquished by the dragons fiery venom.
Even so, it is clear from the poem's first lines that in the time in which the teller writes he is already looking back to ages gone by.
"Listen!" he writes
"The fame of Danish kings
in days gone by, the daring feats
worked by those heroes are well known to us."
From the very outset, the teller's words echo with reminiscence, astounded by the glory cast from days now over.
Of course there is a bit of irony therein that the tale he is about to tell is the only one truly known to us. The heroes of the days gone by and the fame of the Danish kings that lived then remain to us only in fragments. Only that of Beowulf remains intact, though not unscathed. Though there is a bit of prophecy in king Hrothgar's words of praise to him after the monster is slain.
"You (Beowulf) have ensured that men will always sing
your praises, even to the end of the world"
With a little help from a scribe and a monk's foresight (to name a few), this rings true today, for indeed, Beowulf has been remembered.
Beowulf in Heorot by Alan Lee The poem begins by accounting the building of a famous mead-hall. The battles of Hrothgar king of this great hall are accounted only in brief, for they lie outside this legend. It is the hall he builds and what it represents that truly resonates in this tale.
"He," he are told, "resolved to build a hall,
a large and noble feasting-hall
of whose splendours men would always speak ...
In due course
(before very long) this greatest of halls
was completed. Hrothgar, whose very word was counted far and wide as a command, called it Heorot."
Needless to say, the common man no longer speaks of Heorot's splendor, just like the drinking of mead is a custom the meaning of which has been abandoned.
Next the poem recounts how, here, in this hall of great splendor, the "warrior Danes lived joyful lives."
...until the hellish fiend
began to perpetrate base crimes"
Thus, Grendel creeps up from some unknown lair, destroying the Danes' joyful lives. It is said that Heorot remained empty for 12 years after that.
"Thus, Grendel ruled, resisted justice,
one against all, until the best of halls
stood deserted. And so it remained."
Until Beowulf comes. (Remember that word: Until. It is a crucial word.)
Famously, Beowulf slays three monsters throughout the course of the poem, all of which have been probed and studied endlessly since slain by the famous warrior. In many ways, they are a mystery to us still.
The first to be slain was Grendel. He is described as a "hellish fiend", a "notorious prowler", and is a "gruesome" man eating creature, said to be condemned by the creator himself. I will not here recount his slaying. It is of little importance when it comes to the force of fire in this tale.
The second to be slain is Grendel's mother, a more puzzling monster still. The poem describes her as a "monster of a woman" a "sea-wolf" with "ghastly claws". Otherwise, she remains mostly featureless, and thus, a mystery. But she swims with sea monsters and gives birth to fiends, that much we know from the story.
Yet, despite these two monster's fiendish and possibly hellish origins, it is the third one, the dragon, that vanquishes Beowulf.
Grendel's Mother by John HoweI wrote a paper on this question once, for it puzzled me greatly that the dragon, a creature of flesh, fire, and bone, is the one to take down Beowulf the man.
The two die side by side, each taken down by the other. And though, Beowulf proves victorious, it is only moments after the dragon's demise that he too dies, consumed by the serpent's fiery venom.
I no longer think it so strange now that the only truly fleshly creature is the one to slay the warrior.
After all, the blood of Grendel's mother is enough to melt the iron of a sword. In the heat of battle, Grendel and the woman that birthed him are seen only in flashes, in a flurry of blows and swings. They remain mostly featureless. Truthfully, we will probably never fully know what the author's intent with these was. Indeed, they have been re-imagined and debated over ever since.
Still, the narrator makes it clear that there is something unholy about their nature, for they are not beings of flesh. Beowulf slays these apparently hellish beings as a younger man, and lives to tell the tale. Furthermore, he lives to rule Heorot after Hrothgar is gone.
Thus, Beowulf rules into old age... Until the dragon comes.
Turin Turamber, The Children of Hurin, by Alan Lee"It is not until he is himself is old and grey that the dragon appears, rising out of the deep where he has dwelt these last hundred years, sleeping on, unmentioned by the poem and unknown to men. The dragon comes into the story as if summoned by the destiny which binds him to Beowulf."
So I wrote once in a paper discussing the question of why this fate befits the poem. I do believe somewhere within that paper I missed the point.
Beowulf is slain by a creature of flesh, like he is himself. Indeed, even in the wake of monsters, in the end it is the battles of the flesh that prove fatal in this legend.
So, while the corpses of the fiends are never inspected after they are slain, the dragon's corpse remains, exposed under the light of day under an open sky.
Beowulf's men find his body there, lifeless in the sand. Beside him lies the creature. The poem tells us that it was
"a loathsome serpent...
the fire-dragon...
was scorched by its own flames."
How fitting this seems to me now, that the blood in the veins of the fiends was hot enough to burn the sword of the warrior who slays them, yet the dragon's own flesh can be burned by the fire he breathes.
There is something I have not yet told you, reader. As I mentioned in brief, there is a prophecy at the outset of this poem. It appears right after the naming of the great hall of Heorot, the very place Beowulf fights to restore and later rules, the place he dies to protect. It is in this prophecy that there lies the greatest irony in all the poem.
I mentioned at the start of this post the story of how the Beowulf manuscript was saved from a fire.We have already seen much fire in Beowulf. We have seen it in the fiery blood of Grendel's mother, and the fiery venom of the serpent that claims the warrior's life and scorches its own skin.
But there is a more fleshly and consuming fire in Beowulf, a fire lit by a mortal feud.
The narrator tells us that the great hall of Heorot, the very hall the poem concerns itself with preserving, will burn to the ground. It will burn in a bitter feud between the Geatish people and the Swedes. It will be destroyed by men because of a rift of loyalty, thus maiming everything the tale of Beowulf celebrates: honor, glory, fame, and fellowship.
The narrator tells us this on page 3.
Thus, we know before Beowulf even sets foot on the page that what he fights to preserve will not be destroyed by either of the three monsters that threaten it. It will be destroyed by men.
We see the shadow of this prophecy come near in the poem's final pages. The poem ends with war on the kingdoms borders, now exposed without their warrior and king to protect it. Enemies surround its lands even as the smoke of Beowulf's funeral pyre rises to the sky.
"There on Whaleness, the heroes kindled
the most mighty of pyres; the dark wood-smoke
soared over the fire, roaring flames
mingled with weeping ...
until the body became ash, consumed even
to its core...
Heaven swallowed the smoke".
It is true that Beowulf survived time, survived fickle frost, and consuming fire. But it did not do so unscathed. Deep roots are not reached by the frost, which passes with the morning and fades with the seasons. But though we do not know when Beowulf was written, we know that by the time the poem was penned, these great ages were already over.
The manuscript survives today, but it is a brittle remembrance of what Beowulf once symbolized. There are no more meadhalls; today, Lords give no rings for loyalty, and the monsters are all dead. All the dragons have been slain.
One thing has stayed the same, though. Then, like today, it does not take monsters to topple kingdoms and nations. Men topple those themselves.
Remember that word. The inevitably of until can crush the hopeful whisper of unless. As I already mentioned, Beowulf is fire-filled. With a fateful feud lingering on the horizon of its history, it reminds us that even a dragon's flesh can burn in its own fire; and what's more, that even men has hard to kill as Beowulf have been taken down by a dragon.
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