With these words, Princess Ulvild tried to convince her husband Guthorm to rebel against her father, King Hadding. This legendary king of Denmark had grown old and his power had already started to crumble – overthrowing this aged ruler was justifiable, Ulvild held, on account of his years alone. This anecdote, recorded in Saxo Grammaticus’ twelfth-century Gesta Danorum, is illustrative of the problems that faced early medieval kings once they had reached old age – problems that the poet of Beowulf, as will be shown in this chapter, was well aware of.

Mentioning no fewer than twenty-three different kings, the poet of Beowulf certainly shows a keen interest in kingship. While some of these rulers appear only as part of a royal genealogy, others, such as Scyld Scefing, Heremod and Hygelac, are further developed and function as exempla of good or bad rulership. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Levin Schücking’s suggestion that Beowulf must be read as a Fürstenspiegel, ‘a mirror of princes’, has met with widespread agreement. George Garmonsway, for example, concluded:

In other words, the intended audience for Beowulf may have been a king or a prince who could draw inspiration from the poem.

Schücking further hypothesised that Beowulf was composed for the young son of a ruler, possibly the son of a Danelaw king, for whom the poem was intended as a means to learn the Anglo-Saxon language.