The Hero of Darkness

Zachary Detrick

Would we truly have dragons, monsters and beasts without the heroes that slay them? In today’s popular culture we can all get a thrill from watching fearsome creatures slain by noble protagonists. In shows like Game of Thrones and Merlin, there is an association between the Middle Ages and a certain glorious, noble life. However, life was brutally short and some of these shows reflect that in their violent content. Beowulf, a piece of English literature so old that it is unrecognizable as “English,” depicts the life of a valiant hero in medieval Scandinavia, who overcomes the forces of darkness – or so we think – and is eventually defeated in his old age. It is a cultural roadmap to a pagan warrior society. Beyond this surface story there are psychological issues: the impact of Scandinavian darkness and the omission of belief in an afterlife on culture, as well as the representation of primeval fears as the monsters that Beowulf defeats.

Beowulf is the ideal warrior hero. He grows up an isolated child, being underestimated by his people, the Geats. From his childhood he is already defeating sea-monsters. Whether out of simple kindness, or pursuit of valor, he makes his way to Denmark to defeat Grendel. Interestingly, he wants to make a name for himself outside of his homeland. Beowulf is the son of Ecgtheow, and his lineage is never specified beyond this. However, Ecgtheow pledges allegiance to the Danish king Hrothgar because at one point Hrothgar gave him shelter and settled a feud with a warring tribe on his behalf. This leads Hrothgar to treat Beowulf like an adopted son, and similarly, Beowulf tries to please Hrothgar because he feels he owes him a debt. Beowulf’s main character traits are his physical strength and his code of honor. He frequently boasts about his strength, both in killing sea monsters and being able to defeat Grendel with his bare hands. His code of honor ties him to his vows, as well as his familial bond with king Hrothgar.

The three nations in Beowulf, the Swedes, the Geats, and the Danes, are small, clan-like and easily threatened. Seamus Heaney, in his introduction to Beowulf, writes about the scene at the end where a Geat woman keens at the funeral pyre of Beowulf: “The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament…” (p. xxi). The loss of Beowulf is not only the loss of a great king, but of the nation’s security. The poem describes this moment as such: “a wild litany of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke” (lines 3152-55). Without a powerful leader like Beowulf, they are easily invaded and taken over by the neighboring Swedes. The vision of an elusive peace matches David Wright’s writings in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Beowulf: “…where darkness too quickly follows upon light, just as the long northern winter overwhelms the brief season of spring” (Wright, p.19) . The dark tone and chaotic nature of Scandinavian mythos, both Beowulf and the Edda, are easily and often attributed to the northern climate. In a land of little daylight and long, cold winters, the struggle and hopelessness of living is inevitable as a brutish lifestyle takes hold. Thus, we see the Norse gods living constantly in the trepidation of Ragnarök.

In the land of shorter days and pagan gods, the lack of an afterlife is especially felt. Norse mythology, especially in the exploits of Odin, is physical and violent in nature. Odin lives only to gain more knowledge, and then to prove his superior knowledge. Since there is no Christian sense of afterlife, there is no other meaning he can truly ascribe to his life. Similarly, the Æsir mostly live to prove themselves through contests. Beowulf’s only true purposes are as a warrior and as a leader. His “good name” is established by his contests, and then preserved by his rule. In Wright’s words, “[Beowulf] is about how the human being ought to behave when he is without hope. It affirms the human being in a world where everything is transient, whether life, happiness, power, or splendor…” (Wright, p.19). The point of this quote is to illustrate that everything is temporary, a particularly poignant observation about the difference between paganism and Christianity; without an eternal foundation, happiness and all observable things are fleeting, similar to “the flight of a sparrow through a mead-hall” (St. Bede) . The violence, bloodshed and shapeshifting in the Edda are done because if all things are fleeting, what does it really matter? Are there consequences? All that matters is to attain power, and similarly, all that matters to Beowulf is attaining lof or glory. Heorot, the formidable mead-hall of Hrothgar, is an example of the type of hedonism that emerges from this mindset. Lof to Hrothgar is to have a large building to demonstrate his supremacy. Heorot dominates the Danish countryside, and there Hrothgar’s nobles, warriors, and ladies are entertained with many a nocturnal banquet and displays of splendor. Despite all this, Heorot does absolutely nothing to secure the happiness or security of king Hrothgar’s people, as Heorot soon attracts the nocturnal monster Grendel who tastes the flesh of its inhabitants every night for 12 years. This is a staggering length of time for this monster to go undefeated, and on a regular killing spree, much less undefeated by the king of the Danes. Was Hrothgar actually too weak for Grendel? It is possible that in his hedonism Hrothgar was unwilling to give up the pleasures and symbolic status of Heorot simply to save his people. Indeed, the poem never mentions a night where no party in Heorot was held, in order to see if Grendel would forget about them that night. As for Grendel, it seems that either he comes and kills because he is disturbed by Heorot and simply wants peace and quiet, or that he is some sort of manifestation of evil (after all, he is from “Cain’s clan”) bent on spoiling Hrothgar’s happiness. Another possibility, however, is to project a Christian consciousness onto the poem and say that Grendel is a manifestation of the evils of hedonism and excess. Today more than ever we can see how an unchecked lifestyle of debauchery goes awry. Hrothgar sees this monster terrorizing his banquets and his only response is to continue. It is analogous to a person today who cannot stop gambling, drinking, or overspending even when seeing the damage it inflicts.

The three monsters that appear in Beowulf have different characteristics. Grendel, as seen before, is established as a brutish monster who lives off spoiling others’ happiness, almost like a medieval incarnation of the Grinch. He manifests as brutality and raw fear. This is highlighted by Beowulf’s decision to fight Grendel with no weapons: “I have heard moreover that the monster scorns in his reckless way to use weapons…hand-to-hand is how it will be, a life-and-death fight with the fiend” (lines 433-440). Hand-to-hand turns out to be the only way to defeat Grendel, which sets him apart from the other monsters. Weapons and swords imply sophistication and training, and a raw and brutish creature like Grendel can only be met on his own ground with Beowulf’s physical strength. Grendel’s mother manifests as a more mature fear. She emerges from the depths and commits a single act of vengeance, which is all that is needed to assert her evil presence. When Beowulf finds her residence, it is a lake churning with sea-monsters: “There were writhing sea-dragons and monsters slouching on slopes by the cliff, serpents and wild things such as those that often surface at dawn…Down they plunged, lashing in anger at the loud call of the battle-bugle” (lines 1426-32). This depiction of sea-monsters in a lake symbolizes the fears residing in dark depths of one’s consciousness, suddenly churned to action by a war-horn. Beowulf must dive to the bottom of this lake in order to meet the monster that has been nurtured by the subconscious. She fights with, and is defeated by, a sword, which marks her as more mature than Grendel. Instead of waiting like he did for Grendel, we see Beowulf tracking her to a deep hiding-place (one of the “archetypal sites of fear” from Heaney’s introduction) before confronting her, giving her a fully-formed sinister scena (p.xii). Finally, the dragon is a symbol of wyrd or fate. The Old English word for “dragon,” wyrm, resembles this word for fate, and Heaney makes a point of this similarity in his introduction: “He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure of real oneiric power…he lodges himself in the imagination as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae” (Introduction, xix). The dragon makes his appearance after Beowulf has been king for 50 years and entered old age. The dragon is a terrible force that lies dormant but is suddenly awakened by a literal thief in the night, like it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:2: “…the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” This parallel highlights the dragon as a literal Dies irae (“day of wrath”) for Beowulf. The dragon awakens at the perfect, predestined but unexpected, time to close the final chapter in Beowulf’s life. Beowulf dies from this encounter to show us that we can defeat our fears but not fate.

Beowulf is a glimpse into the life of a hero who gives his life to protect people from darkness. Carl Jung describes these heroic actions: “The conquerors of darkness go back into primeval times and together with many other legends, prove that there once existed a state of original psychic distress, namely unconsciousness” (Jung, p.169). The legend of Beowulf exists so that readers could have a hero who defeats “primeval” forces to bring us higher consciousness. However, the tragic nature of Beowulf is that it shows us life is a cycle. Even the form of the poem, opening and closing with a funeral, is almost defeatist. Even though Beowulf did a great thing by defeating the three dark monsters, his death leaves his people vulnerable to tragedy. Their only hope is a symbolic one, as the funeral pyre burns away in the darkness. This is a cycle of light being swallowed by darkness, a characteristic of Scandinavian winters. There is no ability to transcend this cycle as this is a pagan culture with no afterlife. Such a pagan cycle leaves us feeling purposeless, and we either find ourselves living brutishly like the Æsir, or hedonistically like Hrothgar. Either way we are numb ourselves to the joy of life and we lose that “higher consciousness” that Beowulf (and Jung) worked so hard to protect. On the other hand, one is not simply protected by believing in the afterlife. Jung valued the archetypal hero for “being all alone in the world” (Jung, p.169). The lonely hero holds himself to a higher standard of life in order to benefit his world. He strives to be different, to conquer monsters that are totally unique to him. Chris Hodges, pastor at Covenant Church, puts it this way: “You can’t make a difference unless you are different.” While everything within the cycle of life will eventually fade, one must strive to improve other’s lives in order to have an impact that will long outlast our lifespan.

Works Cited

Bede, et al. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Heaney, Seamus. Introduction. Beowulf, Norton, 2000.

Jung, Carl. "The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype," Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Princeton University Press, 1969.

The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan House, 1984

Wright, David. Introduction. Beowulf, Penguin Classics, 1956.