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its many admirers "the only purely heroic poem extant in Old English."
The Anglo-Saxons acquired another heroic past in the lives of Christian apostles, martyrs, and saints. Here the vital relationship between loyal follower and gift-giving lord takes on new meaning. Heroic poems based on Christian legend include two in the Vercelli Book: Andreas (1772 lines), based on the apocryphal Deeds of St. Andrew and St. Matthew in the land of the cannibals; and Elene (1321 lines), signed by Cynewulf and rendering the Latin Deeds of St. Cyriacus; and three in the Exeter Book: Juliana (731 lines), also signed by Cynewulf and the only real saint's life of the group; Guthlac A (818 lines), a meditation on the life of this Mercian nobleman and native English saint; and Guthlac B (561 lines), based on the Latin life by Felix of Crowland (ca. 740) and relating the saint's final illness. The saint, no less than the secular hero, draws attention to a world in which bad fortune is better than good, and life is won by its loss; for the former it is heaven, for the latter, poetry, that makes going down to defeat worthwhile.
Woody Allen's warning to students in Annie Hall "not to take courses where they make you read Beowulf " is evidence at least that the poem is recognized by popular culture. (The name Gower would not work half so well.) We are, as usual, ignorant of the reception Beowulf had among the Anglo-Saxons, its date, its authorship, how widely it was known, or how highly it was regarded. The poem is a blend of folktale fantasy and epic gravity. Twice Beowulf (otherwise unknown) dispatches manlike, man-eating monsters; many years later, he kills a fire-breathing dragon and gets himself killed. The poet draws upon some twenty legends in constructing his northern heroic age; he presents such an internally consistent picture of Scandinavian society

 

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around A.D. 500 that his illusion of historical truth has been taken for the reality.
Beowulf says and does all the right heroic things: "Each of us must experience the end of life in the world," he tells the quaking Danes; "let him who is permitted achieve fame before death. That is for a slain warrior the best there is." Beowulf's victories over his opponents are praised by the narrator and also by other actors in the poem: he was "the strongest of warriors," ''the strongest in might on that day of this life"; his loyalty, munificence, wisdom, and nobility are extolled, along with the formal speeches in which he makes his qualities known. "He held to his high destiny," says Wiglaf of the dead Beowulf, "of all men in the world he was the most glorious warrior." The last word in the poem is uttered by Beowulf's mourners, who commend their slain leader as "most intent on glory."
Heroic literature is temporarily out of fashion, at least in the West. We no longer assume that fighting is glorious or fun, or that hero and warrior are synonymous terms. If Beowulf is widely regarded today as the first great masterpiece of English poetry, it probably has less to do with its hero's might than its poet's melancholy. The poem's heroic fellowship is precarious, a bright hall stalked by menacing shadows. Scenes of rejoicing are swiftly undercut by forecasts of disaster; alliterative pairings like æfter wiste . . . wop 'after the feast . . . lamentation' and gyrn æfter gomene 'sorrow after joy' are dark, mocking refrains. The noble history related turns out to be the stuff that fantasies of younger brothers are made of: the fall of a leader, an underdog's defiant resistance, the automaticity of revenge (called by Auden the earth's only perpetual motion machine).
The Finnsburh Fragment deals in a vivid, close-up way with the same battle at Finn's stronghold sung of by the "scop" in Beowulf 's Heorot. The poet applauds the young warriors for repaying their lord's bright mead so abundantly in battle, just as a retainer in Beowulf urged his comrades to remember their vows at the mead-drinking, and a