Some Disputed Questions in Beowulf–Criticism

Abstract

The Scandinavian analogues to the adventures of Beowulf are of considerable interest to students of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Stories of this type, occasionally affording striking resemblances in detail, appear in distant countries,—among the Japanese and the North American Indians, for example,—but these are clearly of little significance for the evolution of the tale on Germanic soil. And we need hardly attach more weight to the feats of the Celtic hero Cuchulinn, nearer neighbor though he be, than to those of Tsuna in Japan. The case is different with parallels in märchen and saga found among the very peoples by whose kinsfolk the deeds in the epic must have been celebrated. In two instances the story is told of heroes of later times. Grettir the Strong, who subdues two trolls, one in a hall and the other in a cave under a waterfall, was a historical character of the eleventh century, and Orm Storolfsson, whose struggles with a demon cat and a giant recall in many ways the deeds of Beowulf, flourished some two centuries later. The validity of a third parallel, in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, is by no means clear. Here the problem is complicated in various ways. The saga itself is late, hardly older than the time of Chaucer in its present shape, and possibly dating from the early part of the fifteenth century.