Beleriand in Beowulf by Simon J. Cook

Beleriand in Beowulf

This Sense of History post builds on the earlier post by Angelica, Beowulf in Beleriand, and presumes the historical background that Angelica has set out.

Tolkien’s interest in the Anglo-Saxons concerned especially their imagination, specifically their historical imagination, at least as evidenced in Beowulf.  "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," delivered in London in November 1936, presents the Old English poem as a work of historical fiction—an Anglo-Saxon author living in some little kingdom of the British Isles tells a story of the pagan ancestors in the old homeland beyond the sea, and with some art pictures this world as it was imagined by these ancient heroes themselves.

Tolkien presumes that the old poet and the original audience were Christian, and shows how the poet draws a world in which the "heavens" above are just the sky—because the heathen heroes have not heard the Gospel and because they have, already in those ancient days, forgotten the core of their own true traditions. But Beowulf and Hrothgar, who do most of the wise talking in the poem, not only have no sense of heaven as eternity above, they are also none too sure about any immortal realm out there, beyond the horizon of the shoreless sea.

The arguments of the 1936 lecture are framed by a story told in two acts: A man takes some old stones and makes a tower. Then his friends turn up and, eager to inspect the stones, destroy the tower; meanwhile, on the sidelines, the builder’s descendants stand and complain, one to the other, about their ancestor’s sense of proportion. The second act is something of a snare, inviting readers to remain on the ground discussing the shortcomings of other readers. The first act illustrates the poet’s design: An audience in some little Anglo-Saxon kingdom are to climb the stairs and look out upon the world as it was imagined by their heathen ancestors. 

The story concludes with an image of the Anglo-Saxon poet standing on the top of the tower and looking out on the sea, suggesting a bleak view of an empty horizon, the limits of vision where the sky meets the sea. But a few paragraphs later, already deep in argument with the descendants, Tolkien turns us around to survey the entire panoramic view:

When we have read his poem, as a poem, rather than as a collection of episodes, we perceive that he who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms ‘heroes under heaven,’ or ‘mighty men upon earth,’ but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsceg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; wherein, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this ‘geography,’ once held as material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little. It transcends astronomy. Not that astronomy has done anything to make the island seem more secure or the outer seas less formidable.¹

In this commentary, it is vital to appreciate that the "now" in which a flat-earth geography appears antiquated includes not only our own day but also that of the poet and original audience. Part and parcel of the conversion of the English tribes was that they received the whole bundle of Latin learning, which included the ancient Greek notion of a geocentric cosmos as well as the Bible.

The tower of Beowulf takes an Anglo-Saxon audience who live in the British Isles up a flight of stairs to a view on the world of ancient northern story. The idea of the tower stands behind the discussion of entrance into a "Secondary World" in the later essay On Fairy-stories, pointing to the nature of enchantment. The architectural design of a tower allows a spectator to enter into the world of the story and survey it from a great height; but not to step into it through a high window—to step out from the top of the tower is to fall.

The hæleð under heofenum appear only once in Beowulf, in line 52, where they are gazing mournfully out to sea, pondering without knowledge the final destination of the funeral-ship that took the good king into the uttermost West. Here is Tolkien’s translation (my emphasis on hæleð under heofenum):

     Sad was their heart 
and mourning in their soul. None can 
report with truth, nor lords in their halls, 
nor mighty men beneath the sky, who received that load.²

We are watching these tragic heroes from our vantage point at the top of the tower. We are looking inland, but they are gazing out to sea. We see an Anglo-Saxon imagination of the ancient pagan heroes of old—mighty men beneath the sky—who lived and died in a world the edges of which they did not understand, neither above nor beyond. 

Tolkien reads heofenum as a nod to an audience who know that eternity is above the sky because they have received new tidings about the world. In the secondary world of the poem heaven was known, once upon a time, but this knowledge was forgotten so long ago that the forgetting has been forgotten. The poem begins rather with the great forgetting of this ancient age of the world, which concerns the sea. Nobody in this world is any longer quite sure who or what dwells on the further shore of the shoreless sea.

Works Cited

1. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 18.
2. Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, lines 37-40.