Beowulf and the Pitfalls of Piety

Abstract

One of the oldest and easily the favourite of the problems of Beowulf is its Christian element. In recent years it has loomed particularly large, provoking energetic discussion and re-examination. In Lewis E. Nicholson's recent An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (Notre Dame, 1963), no fewer than ten of its eighteen articles are concerned with the problem. And by far the greatest energy has gone into wide-ranging and freewheeling attempts to establish the "essential Christianity" of the poem. A current general interest in mediaeval allegory has no doubt provided a stimulus for those Beowulf critics no longer content with the simple "Christian colouring" formula of an earlier generation. But whatever the cause, the result has been an extraordinary, and perhaps unprecedented, critical disarray-ranging from minor text-bending to something close to sheer fantasy. Untenable assumptions about both the poem and its audience are accepted with regularity and without question, and even very careful and scholarly writers resort to specious argument, farfetched parallels, and rhetorical legerdemain.