Beowulf, Fire and Flesh

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 

(Note: My sincere apologies to artists Alan Lee and John Howe for burning your art for this project.)

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 Howe

I 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.

And as Tolkien wrote in this essay "The Monsters and the Critics", Beowulf is a poem about our land and our language.  

"(Beowulf) was made in this land,"he writes. "It moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal –until the dragon comes."

 

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.

The Tragedy of Peter Pan

The Star-Crossed Story of How Peter Lost Wendy

I recently wrote about the puzzling feeling of panic my first encounter with Fantastic Mr. Fox left me with. Yet recently I have been thinking about another beloved story from my childhood that leaves me with a far deeper and more personal sort of pain.

The people who are closest to me know that I only watch the film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (2003) when I'm incredibly sad. This is because as far back as I can remember, watching the film has left me with a deep feeling of heartache that I could never quite explain.

While the book is in some ways lighter and more whimsical than the film I am referring to, it has a similar sense of sorrow beneath its childish fancy that no child will ever fully pick up on. For one, the fairies and pirates are too distracting, but for another, these gentle sorrows are whispered in a voice only an adult will hear. Children need not trouble themselves with them. Peter Pan has other secrets for them. 

Peter Pan is, after all, a tale that is greatly concerned with children and the act of growing up, and naturally, it contains secrets for both adults and children alike.

Like many books, it begins by stating a universal fact (which it will inevitably try to slip away from).

"All children grow up," the book claims.

Yet contained in this very same line the story simultaneously creates an exception.

"Except one," it whispers. And with that Peter Pan slips away across the page, like across the night sky, revealing himself to be the extraordinary exception to the first universal rule every child eventually comes to know.

Childhood feels like it's forever, while it lasts that is. And at the beginning of Barrie's pondering over this simple idea, he informs us that Wendy was aware of the inevitable-ness of her having to age out of childhood ever since she was two years old. It happened when her mother cried out, quite innocently, "oh, why can't you remain like this forever". And there is that word: forever.

"Two is the beginning of the end," Barrie writes. Another fact.

So, Wendy became aware that forever was only a dream; that forever was available to no one, and nothing.

Not even Peter Pan.

 

Growing up is gradual, and you won't know exactly when you've done it, nor will you know how; much less why. I surely can't tell you how it happens, only that it starts happening when a child first begins to mourn that they will not stay this way forever. (I remember crying over this myself when I was young and wanted everything to be permanent.)

Yet Peter Pan remains the grand exception. For Peter, everything is permanent. And so, from the moment she first meets him in her wakefulness, Wendy, who is by now a great deal more grown up than Peter is, knows that she is "in the presence of a tragedy".

Why? Why this painful word at the beginning of a tale about wonder and childishness?

For Peter Pan, there is another word, equally painful; a word out of which all the great tragedies are made. Love.

The first time the tale mentions it we pay it little heed, for it is a grown up word, unfamiliar to the cares of children.

 

The tale tells the account of how Mr. Darling won their mother's heart by stating a very remarkable and seemingly impossible fact: that once upon a time, when her parents were younger, a great "many gentlemen who had (once) been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her".

Strange, and though perhaps slightly exaggerated, not that strange, after all. For that is how it works. Is it not? One moment you are two and just beginning to wonder if things will ever change, and the next, there is first love; a love that by its first-ness is so unlike the simple love you once knew for your parents. It is not even like the love you have seen your parents display for one another, for there is nothing practical nor sensible about it. This love is a truly unique sort of love, totally untarnished by adulthood. And it is likely that you will never feel anything like it again.

That is part of the enchantment: that you can only love in this way while you are a child, and no child can ever love this way more than once.

It is exactly this type of love that, I believe, Peter Pan feels for Wendy, and she in turn feels for him. It is a love rich in childishness.

We do not know when Peter first sees her. But we do know that she is the first girl he ever brings to Neverland, and I believe that speaks for itself.

As Wendy and her brothers fly away, the narrator asks us if the parents will reach the nursery in time. But time is of little relevance in this story– at least, for now, and if time had played its course then and worked its right, then we would have no story at all.

Yet, when the narrator solemnly promises us that "it will come right in the end" one could also suppose that he not talking about the parent's distress at finding the nursery empty. What he might just as well be saying is that the children will not slip out of time forever. Either way, the answer is the same: the children will return, and time will go right before the story ends.

 

After this, great adventures are had in Neverland, and though it would bring me great thrill to recount them, I think that would be missing the point. I am no longer a child, after all; and adventure, though wonderful, does not apply nor speak to me as it once did. I think of the coming chapters fondly. But nonetheless, they always end so quickly. I cannot hold onto them no matter what I do. The pages pass too quickly. 

But glimpsed between these lines, we see the tragic nature of Peter, and this has never left me.  Wendy knew from the beginning that she was in the presence of a tragedy, and she sees it also there, in the wondrous Neverland. She sees it late at night, when Peter Pan is sleeping and unaware of her.

The narrator tells us that sometimes Peter had dreams that are fully unlike the dreams of other boys, for they were more painful and far more troubling.

"For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them... At such times it has been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she has subjected him."

The narrator never tells us what Peter Pan was dreaming about, only that these dreams had to do with the riddle of Peter's existence. Yet their very painfulness reveals to me now a piece of the tragedy. No feeling, no matter how unchildlike, can alter Peter's nature, can push him into adulthood. Children grow up gradually; they grow up every time they feel something that their childish hearts cannot bare, beginning with the very feeling of the impermanence of the things around them, or of themselves. It lies in the painful contradiction of Peter's nature that a boy who dreams of such un-boyish and troublesome things cannot grow up, can neither out grow them or grow up to understand them better.

Peter Pan has another dream the night they fly back to London to bring Wendy and her brothers home. The story tells us that Wendy held him tight that night, while he was sleeping. But the chapter ends there, and in the one that follows, Wendy Darling returns home. And so, Peter Pan is confronted with the first thing since his whimsical life on Neverland began that has not been permanent.

Peter Pan never admits to loving Wendy, as boys that age never do, expect maybe to their mothers. Peter Pan does. And, because everyone knows that Peter Pan does not have a mother, he tells her's (though she's asleep, and so, she does not hear him.) "I'm fond of her too," he whispers.

 

As the children reunite with their parents, the narrator takes us back outside the window to glance at the sight of the "strange boy", a boy who he tells us as "ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know". And yet, here he was "looking at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

For Peter Pan, the space between growing up is as narrow and thin as the sheet of glass from Wendy Darling's nursery window.

So why all this? Well, it dawned on me when I listened to Taylor Swifts new song "Cardigan", of all places. Therein lies a line that brought be back to this familiar heart ache story, a line about how Peter loses Wendy.

Strange, that Taylor Swift should sing about Peter Pan in a break up song; and yet, not so strange at all. Because Peter Pan does lose Wendy, in the end. But that is not what makes it all so terrible. What really hurts deep within myself, is the part of me that knows that it takes growing up to get over such a heart break.

The story of Peter Pan, with all its marvelousness and magic, still makes me ache. It made me ache as a child, but only because I could sense, even then, how terribly lonely Peter Pan was there at the end of the film when he looks at Wendy through the window.

As I grew, it reminded me of a different kind of heart ache, the kind that breaks your heart when a childish love doesn't end well and it feels like all the world will never be the same.

I cannot even listen to the musical piece from the film entitled "Fairy Dance" without feeling a twinge of loss deep inside myself, in a box that no one else will ever open. Over time though, I have learned that it is a beautiful kind of heart ache. The kind of hurt your heart feels when you love someone so much that it aches inside, like a tight hug in reverse.

At last, a few weeks ago, I walked down the aisle to this song, so forever reversing what was once a tragedy into the fairy tale definition of a happy ending.

The only feeling of sadness I feel now is that I might never need to watch Peter Pan again; that there will never be a night in which my heart hurts so much that it feels like the world is ending. I have grown out of it, I suppose.

Now, when I hurt, I get to hug my husband. And, what's more, I know from experience that time will pass, and I will grow in wisdom, and I one day I will get over it, no matter how deep the hurt.