Christianity and Paganism in Beowulf

Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxons
Part 1: Introduction
Although the epic Old English poem Beowulf has all the characteristics of myth and legend that pertain to fiction, as a historical document it is useful in teaching about the past—the values and culture of the medieval Anglo-Saxon society and how Christian culture intersected with the pagan world at a time when Christian conversion was spreading. Not only does Beowulf refer to real kings of the time, thus grounding the story in a specific historical reality, but it also describes a culture of co-existence—an old world people and place situated neatly between paganism and Christianity. As an epic poem Beowulf describes the heroic journey of the titular character as he accepts the challenge of Hrothgar to defend his Hall against the monster Grendel. Beowulf defeats the monster and then must face the wrath of Grendel’s mother. Many decades after his victory over Grendel’s mother, Beowulf faces a mighty dragon and, while victorious (with some assistance) in battle against the dragon he is mortally wounded. This paper will show that, as an historical document, Beowulf can teach about the history of the Scandinavian people who serve as the focus of the narrative, their culture and values, and how Anglo-Saxons lived during a period when they were being converted from paganism to Christianity.
Part 2: Historical Context of Beowulf and Scandinavian Kings
The Anglo-Saxon people actually consisted of three main groups as their name (partially) implies—the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes.[footnoteRef:2] England today is named after the Angles, but during the Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxon people migrated from Scandinavia, the northern part of Germanic Europe—Jutland, Anglia, the Saxon Coast, and Frisia (modern day Denmark, Germany and Netherlands). The migration period (410-560) saw the flow of northern Germanic people moving to Roman-Britain as a result of a crumbling Empire that left a vacuum for people to fill. When Rome was attacked in 410 by the Visigoths, Roman soldiers were sent from Britain to other more vulnerable parts of the Empire leaving the Celtic-Britons behind and the region open for colonization, setting off a wave of migration by warriors willing to fight to gain the farmland of Britain. [2: Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.]
The epic poem Beowulf teaches about the way of life for these Scandinavian people. Two tribes in particular are referenced: the Geats and the Danes. The mythical aspect of the poem is that the hero Beowulf is the leader of the Geats who travels to the Danes to fulfill a debt and defeat the monster Grendel. The historical aspect of the poem is the reference to one King Hygelac, an uncle of Beowulf, who died in a raid to Frisia[footnoteRef:3] by a group known as the Hetwaras along the Rhine. King Hygelac is supposed to represent King Chlochilaicus the Dane, a real Scandinavian king mentioned in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, and the Hetwaras represent the Chatturarii Frankish tribe.[footnoteRef:4] Chlochilacius was killed by the Chatturarii around 521 AD—and the poem reflects this historical fact in its details. Beowulf may be fictional, but it is rooted contextually in the real experiences, lives and events of the medieval world. Not much is known today about the author or the exact date when it was written, but best guesses indicate that it was written some centuries after these events in England and, based upon the Christian references it is likely the author was influenced by Christian culture. This topic will be explored in more detail in Part 4, however. [3: Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 341.] [4: Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, translated with an introduction by Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Books, 1974), 163.]
Part 3: The Culture and Values of the Anglo-Saxons
The unknown Anglo-Saxon poet weaves into Beowulf elements of Anglo-Saxon culture which via the concepts of “wergild” and “wyrd.” The story of Beowulf contains Anglo-Saxon traits and cultural values, vividly depicted in the writing and thus capable of teaching the reader about the history of the medieval world). Wergild for instance was a concept best described as “man-payment”—a practice among the ancient Germanic tribes prior to the establishment of Christianity. Man-payment was a law that applied to murder: When someone was killed, the murderer was forced to pay the dead individual’s family to compensate (through shillings) for the life the murderer had taken. Wergild was a form of monetary restitution.[footnoteRef:5] [5: Lisi Oliver, Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 49; T.B. Lambert, Theft, Homicide, and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law, in Past and Present, no. 214 (February 2012), 20.]
In Beowulf, the idea of wergild applies to Beowulf’s journey to the Danes. The reason for the journey is rooted in wergild: because King Hrothgar provided a favour for Beowulf’s father Ecgtheow, who had killed a major figure of a group called the Wulfings. Ecgtheow tried to pay wergild, but the Wulfings did not accept it. King Hrothgar’s wife was a member of the Wulfing tribe and it was Hrothgar who influenced the Wulfings to accept Ecgtheow’s wergild. Grateful for the king’s intervention, Beowulf felt indebted to Hrothgar and wanted to show his appreciation: that is why he traveled to put himself at the service of the Dane. Lines 456-472 of the poem illustrate this perfectly well: “There was a feud one time, begun by your father…I healed the feud by paying: I shipped a treasure trove to the Wulfings and Ecgtheow acknowledged me with oaths of allegiance.”[footnoteRef:6] As his father’s son, Beowulf is there to make good the oaths. Thus it can easily be seen that wergild is one of the reasons underlying Beowulf’s decision to fight Grendel. As an honorable and valorous man, Beowulf acknowledged the debt he owed to Hrothgar and wanted to pay it by killing Grendel. [6: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 459-472.]
Grendel, too, is described in the context of wergild—and his refusal to pay wergild in reparations for his raids on the Danes serves to cast him as a villain. The poet states of Grendel that “he would never parley or make peace with any Dane nor stop his death-dealing nor pay the death-price. No counselor could ever expect fair reparation from these rabid hands.”[footnoteRef:7] Thus, wergild can be seen to be an important concept among the Anglo-Saxons during the medieval period. [7: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 154-158.]
Then there is the concept of “wyrd,” which refers to fate. Wyrd was an integral part of the Anglo-Saxon heroic code. It was a belief in one’s personal destiny and fate. Payne defines wyrd as “the force that hovers at the outer edge of man’s imaginative space” and she notes that in Beowulf the main character’s “three battles with the monsters represent his progression from total freedom in the face of Wyrd to his eventual total confinement.”[footnoteRef:8] Indeed, Beowulf understands as much and is not bent on denying his fate but accepts it as one must accept one’s cross in the Christian tradition: “Fate goes ever as fate must,”[footnoteRef:9] Beowulf states and thus expresses the crossover between the Wyrd and the sense of a hero taking upon oneself that cross that God has set out for one: for Beowulf his greatness has made it so that his cross is to counter the greatest of evils—even if it means finally falling in battle himself. It is what he must do: it is his Wyrd, just as Christ’s Wyrd was to offer Himself on the Cross for the redemption of mankind. It is this Wyrd that served as the great spirit of transformation from the pagan to the Christian worlds, both in Beowulf and within the Anglo-Saxon culture. [8: Anne F. Payne, Three aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf by Anne F. Payne, in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 20-21.] [9: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 455.]
Part 4: Conversion to Christianity
The reason scholars suspect Beowulf was written a few centuries after the historical events depicted by Gregory of Tours in his history of the Franks is that the Anglo-Saxons of Britain did not even begin to convert to Christianity until the 7th century.[footnoteRef:10] The Catholic missionaries came from Rome, Iona and Gaul and brought books with them, including the Gospels, thus creating a culture of learning and reading among the warrior/farmer kingdoms of Britain. The English churches grew substantial libraries and books were in great demand among the missionaries and manuscripts were viewed as treasures since this a period well before the arrival of the printing press nearly a thousand years later.[footnoteRef:11] Religious communities were committed to preserving these manuscripts and clerics were of vital importance to their intellectual life. One of the most important manuscripts to be passed around was the Lives of the Saints, which was used to catechize the English. As the missionaries would carry the relics of saints with them to their various assignments and churches throughout England, having the Saints Lives books with them helped to inform the people they converted as to the meaning and significance of those relics.[footnoteRef:12] [10: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2.] [11: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3.] [12: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5.]
Thus the Anglo-Saxons were converted by the stories of the lives of the Saints as well as the miraculous works associated with their relics. As Payne notes, “religious communities were careful to record and proclaim the power of saints whose relics they claimed to possess.”[footnoteRef:13] As a result, the first kingdom in Britain to be converted to Christianity was Kent under the steady hand of Augustine, who came there at the end of the 6th century and soon converted King Ethelberht. The king donated land in Canterbury to the Church and allowed for the spread of Christianity, though his own son at first resisted the Church and even married his own mother-in-law when his father died.[footnoteRef:14] There remained as well some contention between the British (Roman) and the English (Germanic) peoples, and British Christians did little to mix with or convert their English neighbors, which greatly perturbed Bede, another missionary and historian of the English people.[footnoteRef:15] Thus, in the 7th century, there was a good mix of Christian, pagan and everything in between among the Anglo-Saxons and British people. Ethelbert for example had married Bertha, the daughter of a Frankish king, and that marriage had only been permitted on the condition that Bertha be allowed to practice her Christian religion without interference from her pagan husband. As Bede points out, the marriage was a success as far as the Church was concerned—for Ethelbert soon converted to the religion of his wife and so too did his kingdom. Thus, the Christian religion spread by way of the rulers of the realm—from the top down. The priests already in the area were not as committed as the missionaries like Augustine and Bede, and while many English wanted to baptized they had to await more zealous prelates to arrive, which is what Gregory indicated in his letters.[footnoteRef:16] Thus, Augustine was made a bishop even before he arrived in England, and by the start of the 7th century there were bishoprics in London, Rochester and Canterbury. As these bishoprics were supported by Ethelbert, the king’s death reversed the situation temporarily and the bishops in London and Rochester were obliged to run for their lives when Ethelbert’s pagan son took over command of the kingdom. Only after Ethelbert’s son converted and was baptized did the missionary zeal take hold once more in England with baptisms flowing throughout East Anglia.[footnoteRef:17] [13: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5.] [14: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 41.] [15: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 92.] [16: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93.] [17: P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, by P.H. Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 94.]
Augustine played a pivotal role in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and had been sent by Gregory the Great specifically to assist in that purpose as the priests already there were failing to do their duties. Bede provides the history of Augustine’s missionary activities at the time and shows how Ethelbert gave Augustine permission to preach in Kent. Because of Ethelbert’s Christian wife, of course, he was predisposed to hear the missionaries out and to keep them from harm upon their arrival—as Bede himself points out: “For he had already heard of the Christian religion, having a Christian wife of the Frankish royal house…and after some days, the king came to the island and, sitting down in the open air, summoned Augustine and his companions to an audience.”[footnoteRef:18] It was thus that the Christian religion came to be seeded among the Anglo-Saxons, though even in the royal house there remained a mixture of pagan and Christian cultures, and the same was true for the Anglo-Saxon culture. [18: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People : with Bede’s letter to Egbert (Penguin, 1990), 75.]
This co-existence of two cultures is evident in Beowulf, which reflects the introduction of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxon society. First, there is the concept of “wyrd,” which has already been shown to have both a pagan and Christian meaning to it. The pagan meaning is that fate controls all things and that whatever fate has in store for one, there is no getting around it. The Christian meaning is that in order for one to truly be heroic in the same manner in which Christ was heroic, one should accept one’s wyrd—i.e., the will of God—even if it means sacrificing oneself for others. It is heroic to take up one’s cross and follow Christ, which is the ultimate symbol of Christianity. This idea is expressed beautifully in Beowulf, who pays the debt of his father to Hrothgar by defeating Grendel, then goes on to defeat Grendel’s mother just to show that he will go the extra mile to do what is needed in order to protect others whom he has sworn to protect. And then finally when he himself is king of the Geats he faces off against the dragon, a medieval symbol of Satan, and defeats him but not without the help of one his own followers, who symbolizes the Church itself following in the footsteps of Christ to carry out the mission and will of God—of wyrd—in the world.
The pagans and the Christians both had a sense of the “Shaper” in the world as Weil puts it—but in Beowulf the question remains: “Who is the ‘Shaper’…? Is it wyrd, the fixed fate that shaped the pagan world of the Anglo-Saxons? Or is it the Christian God whose worship they adopted?...Or does the poem contain a genuine synthesis of two world-views? I believe that the latter is true,”[footnoteRef:19] writes Weil. Wyrd itself is an Old English word that means “to shape”—and the shaping of life and of the circumstances that impact one’s life is what is referred to by wyrd. The pagan sense of the word would have been informed by a sense of a vague, mysterious Shaper; the Christian sense of the word would have removed the mysterious veil somewhat and showed that the Shaper was the Triune God whose aims were beneficent in the great scheme of things. Thus, wyrd which originated in a pagan culture had Christian applications that resonate in Beowulf. For the Anglo-Saxon pagans, the Shaper was the Sceppend—or God, as the Christian missionaries explained Him. In Beowulf, wyrd is “subordinate to both ‘wise God’ and ‘the man’s courage’,”[footnoteRef:20] which indicates that God’s will did not override the free will of men in the Christian doctrine. At the same time, it was very much a pagan Anglo-Saxon belief that the individual mattered and that one had to show bravery and grace under fire—i.e., make heroic choices, just as Beowulf does. For the Anglo-Saxons to embrace Christianity they essentially had to embrace a new Creator, Ruler and Shaper—or at least a new concept of the Shaper. However, they were fortunate in that Christianity did not oblige them to abandon their belief in the power of the individual to make choices—for Christianity itself embraced the idea of free will and the notion that man must work in unison with the will of God—with wyrd—to be heroic. Thus, Christianity fit well with the pagan Anglo-Saxon worldview from the start: it simply gave a more detailed and historical account of the state of the world and man’s role in it vis-à-vis the Shaper. As Weil points out, Beowulf is a poem that “suggests true compatibility between pagan and Christian ideas about the relationships of men to whatever force controlled the universe.”[footnoteRef:21] Fate and God could be seen in similar terms, though they could also be seen in conflicting terms—which is why the poem has such a mixture of pagan and Christian concepts: this mixture was the reality of medieval England in the 7th century. [19: Susanne Weil, Grace under Pressure: "Hand-Words," "Wyrd," and Free Will in "Beowulf”, Pacific Coast Philology (1989), 94.] [20: Susanne Weil, Grace under Pressure: "Hand-Words," "Wyrd," and Free Will in "Beowulf”, Pacific Coast Philology (1989), 95.] [21: Susanne Weil, Grace under Pressure: "Hand-Words," "Wyrd," and Free Will in "Beowulf”, Pacific Coast Philology (1989), 103.]
Another example of this co-existence of religions is exemplified through Hrothgar himself. He has conflicting religions within him: his culture is one that reveals a world of pagan gods vs. the one true God with Hrothgar and his Danes.  In lines 170-188, the Danes pray to pagan idols because of how Grendel took over Heorot: “Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed offerings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way….”[footnoteRef:22] The author of Beowulf even points out how the Almighty God was unknown to them.  However, in lines 925-941 the Danish king, Hrothgar, is continually grateful to God, declaring his own Christian beliefs: “First and foremost, let the Almighty Father be thanked for this sight. I suffered a long harrowing by Grendel. But the Heavenly Shepherd can work His wonders always and everywhere.”[footnoteRef:23] Thus, the leader of the Danes—like Bertha and later Ethelbert in Anglia—was a Christian while some of his people still possessed pagan beliefs. Really, this was no different from the Jews who relapsed into paganism and worshiped the golden calf while Moses tended to matters in the mountain, receiving the Ten Commandments from God. In times of turmoil, the weak turn to false gods while the strong stay steadfast and faithful. This is evident in Beowulf. The author would have understood this as his sympathy is fully Christian—clear since he refers to the pagans as pagans, which he would not do if he were not Christian himself. The timeline also lines up because the conversion of the Anglo Saxons started at around 597 and ended in the late 7th century. The poem itself was written anywhere from 700-1000, so it is likely that the poet wanted to convey Christian elements in the Beowulf poem itself. To remain realistic, it shows pagan elements as well and how some people still had pagan beliefs. Thus, the poem of Beowulf represents the process of conversion from paganism to Christianity, based on the elements of both paganism and Christianity in the region at the time. As Kevin Crossley-Holland and Heather O’Donoghue note, the author’s “re-creation of the Scandinavian past is thus richly ambivalent,”[footnoteRef:24] full of a pagan past but also just as full of a Christian present. [22: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 175-178.] [23: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 927-930.] [24: Kevin Crossley-Holland and Heather O’Donoghue, Beowulf: The Fight at Finnsburh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), viii.]
Part 5: Conclusion
The poem of Beowulf can be used to teach about Anglo-Saxon culture and values. It represents a time when the Anglo-Saxons were converting to Christianity, when some were pagan and some were Christian. It shows a Christian spirit in Hrothgar, who could symbolize a kind of Ethelbert, who converted prior to the conversion of the whole realm. Thus, the king has a Christian conception of God, like the author, while the people in the fear turn to pagan idolatry to protect them from Grendel. The hero himself Beowulf represents both the pagan and the Christian, who is approaching Wyrd and offering himself as wergild to Hrothgar for his father’s debts—so he is engaging in both a pagan custom but also symbolizing a Christian concept, that one can pay for the debts of others, which is the essence of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. As the pagan world of the Anglo-Saxons was coming to Christianity at the end of the 6th and into the 7th centuries, it had to be educated on the Christian worldview and who the Shaper was. This concept is found in Beowulf, which reflects the realistic times of the Anglo-Saxon history—the mixture of the pagan and the Christian as two cultures came into contact with one another, first through the marriage of the pagan kind Ethelbert to the Christian princess Bertha, and then later when Augustine arrived in Anglia to convert the Angles and Saxons to the Christian religion en masse. Beowulf shows a time in history when there was a co-existence of cultures and beliefs—yet ultimately the author expresses a Christian worldview through his own sense of the Triune God as the real Shaper of things.

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