Critical Introduction

Beowulf is mysterious. Scholars are unsure of its date of composition (anywhere between 750 CE and 1050 CE), and its author is unknown. There is strong textual evidence that the Beowulf-poet, as he has come to be called, did not invent the story but that it existed much earlier as part of an oral tradition. However, the two great characters—Beowulf and Grendel—have no literary history that scholars have been able to discover, so they seem to have entered into English literary history ex nihilo. Finally, the poem exists in only one extant manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Although it is now considered the crown jewel of Old English literature, Beowulf does not seem to have been particularly distinguished in its own time or even in more recent history. (It was not transcribed and published until 1815.)

Part of that lack of respect was no doubt due to the importance of monsters to the story. The manuscript of which it is a part contains other monster-themed texts (The Life of Saint Christopherand Wonders of the East, for example), but monsters were not of great interest to the monastic centers which largely controlled the production of texts. Little changed in the poem's early critical history: those who studied it seemed embarrassed by its focus on monsters, and it was not until 1936 that J.R.R. Tolkien (“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”) broke through the morass and made Beowulf's monsters acceptable for study.

The structure of the poem follows Beowulf's fight with the three great monsters: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. Beowulf's purposes in these fights never change, as he is intent on gaining glory and honour; the monsters’ reasons for violence, however, vary in each circumstance, ranging from Grendel's apparent evil, to Grendel's mother's revenge, to the dragon's greed. This gives the monsters themselves, perhaps, a greater depth of character than the hero for whom the poem is named. For all the attention paid to the monsters, however, we never get a clear description or image of them. Grendel and his mother are shaped like humans, and the dragon is black and snake-like; beyond that, the monsters are shrouded in shadow. Despite a century of study and criticism, Beowulf is still mysterious.