Beowulf and the Koran: Finding a Place in the Universe Via Intertextuality

Beowulf and the Koran

In some sense, both Beowulf and the Koran can be understood as adaptations of standard Judeo-Christian scripture to specific culture contexts: each text actually relies upon the previously existing text of the Bible to establish its own bona fides. Yet it is unclear in both cases to what extent this relation bears. In the case of Beowulf, some scholars have argued that the Christian-themed passages in the poem are a later insertion. In the case of the Koran, obviously many of the central tenets of Christianity and Judaism are overturned completely. But in both cases what we are witnessing is an attempt to create a culturally-specific text that can approach the subject of the purpose and meaning of life, while adapting elements of the central western religious tradition and scripture in order to establish the seriousness of the newer text.

In Beowulf, presumably, an older pagan song -- which celebrates the deeds of a warrior who battles and defeats monsters -- is being adapted to the Christian tradition. Thus traditional warrior virtues, such as loyalty to a monarch and valor in physical combat, are made to serve a moral purpose. And this moral purpose is established by essentially making the antagonistic monster Grendel into a character out of Biblical fan-fiction:

So times were pleasant for the people there

Until finally one, a fiend out of hell,

Began to work his evil in the world.

Grendel was the name of this grim demon

Haunting the marches, marauding round the heath

And the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time

In misery among the banished monsters,

Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed

And condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel

The Eternal Lord had exacted a price:

Cain got no good from committing that murder

Because the Almighty made him anathema

And out of the curse of his exile there sprang

Ogres and elves and evil phantoms

And the giants too who strove with God

Time and again until He gave them their reward. (Heaney 9)

The author of Beowulf is here placing Grendel's origins at a time before Noah's flood, and likening him to Cain in the Book of Genesis. The primal evil of Cain's fratricide in the Bible is here transformed into the source of evil monsters. As a result, the tribal warrior virtues that are embodied in Beowulf are made to serve a purpose: he is fighting a sort of evil that is meant to be understood as ancient and always lurking and deliberately cursed by God himself.

This same method of using the existing Biblical texts to establish a mythic space for a different cultural tradition is quite obviously found in the Koran as well. Just as Beowulf finds a way of establishing the reason for evil in the world of the poem -- by giving Grendel an origin-story that links him to the origin of evil in Genesis -- so does the Koran find a way for establishing the existence of Mohammed and his believers in the world by discovering their mythic origins in the Book of Genesis as well. This centers on the Koran's unusual revision of the Old Testament, in which Ishmael -- the son that Abraham has by his servant Hagar, and who is cast off when Abraham's elderly wife Sarah finally conceives Isaac -- is made central to the religious tradition in the way that Isaac is central in Judaism. Indeed, the Koran appears to replace Isaac with Ishmael in the most famous story about Isaac, the command from God for Abraham to sacrifice him. The Koran deals with this in Sura 37, verses 107 following, where the Genesis story is retold but the child is not named:

And We ransomed him

With a momentous sacrifice:

And We left (this blessing)

For him among generations

(To come) in later times:

"Peace and salutation

To Abraham!"

Thus indeed do We reward

Those who do right

For he was one

Of Our believing Servants.

And We gave him

The good news

Of Isaac -- a prophet,