Arthuriana

Beowulf is not set in England; none of its characters can be said with certainty to be English. Its action takes place before 'England' existed actually or conceptually. On the basis of Gregory of Tours' account in the Historia Francorum, Beowulf's lord Hygelac died before 530 CE, placing the poem firmly in the 'migration period' that saw Germanic-speaking colonists from northern continental Europe arrive in the British Isles. Conventionally, the poem's setting is regarded as an integrative reimagining done in England of inherited narrative material that came with the migrants who became known as the Angles. The stories that Beowulf tells came from Scandinavia, but the poem itself reworked these stories in a distinctively Old English poetic idiom for the benefit of an audience somewhere in (what would become known as) England. In The Nordic Beowulf, the Swedish archaeologist Bo Gräslund proposes that Beowulf is not, in fact, an Old English poem, but rather an East Norse composition that was later imported to England in oral form, translated there into the local vernacular, and eventually adapted better to accord with prevailing Christian mores.

Gräslund is not the first scholar to propose a non-English origin for Beowulf, which some nineteenth-century scholars were accustomed to claim for their own national tradition, whether German, Swedish, or Icelandic. But these approaches, occasionally tarnished by their association with nationalistic trends in Medieval Studies, have long been out of fashion. In preferring to search for Beowulf's origins in Scandinavian history rather than Old English literary traditions, Gräslund's work strikes me as old-fashioned, but his references to other scholarship are scrupulously up-to-date. He is also part of a minor contemporary trend that seeks to turn the clock back on the question of Beowulf's origins to the days before Tolkien's famous assertion of the poem's literariness: Tom Shippey's Beowulf and the North before the Vikings also appeared in 2022, and his arguments are complementary to Gräslund's. The two scholars are united in their belief that Beowulf is older, more historical, less [End Page 183] literary, and more traditional than prevailing trends in criticism would have one believe: a very early date for the poem, and a point of origin outside of England, best account for their reading of the poem. Typically, the context they provide for Beowulf is then used to authenticate the reading of the poem that provided the basis for their contextualization—this is the hermeneutic circle of Beowulf-studies, and critics on all sides of the dating debate find it hard to escape its centripetal force.

The evidence that Gräslund gives in support of his provocative thesis, however, is copious and of various kinds. His chapters on the archeological contexts provided by late Iron Age Scandinavia are illuminating, pointing out, inter alia, that Beowulf's obsession with golden arm-rings as tokens of prestige is much more closely paralleled by finds in migration period Sweden than anything observable in the British Isles; mail-shirts of the type that Beowulf wears in his fights with Grendel's mother and the dragon are conspicuous by their absence from the archaeological record in England, but are relatively common in elite burials across Scandinavia in the period; the poem's descriptions of cremations—though much altered by the religious attitudes of a later redactor—reflect pagan Scandinavian practices much better than any funerary traditions that have been identified in early medieval England. These insights from the material culture of the period are helpful for confirming the verisimilitude of Beowulf's descriptions of the world it creates, and Gräslund's archaeological expertise will add value to any reader's understanding of the poem's setting.

The strength of Gräslund's interpretation of the archaeological record, however, is insufficient to support the weight of his conclusions. Gräslund claims that '[a]n Old English poet cannot possibly, on the basis of either personal experience or indigenous antiquarian tradition...