Melancholy of Beowulf

Tolkein captured the feel of Beowulf more accurately than anyone:

“Beowulf is not an ‘epic,’ not even a magnified ‘lay.’ No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather ‘elegy.’ It is an heroic-elegiac poem; and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge . . . one of the most moving ever written.”

The Beowulf poet, he says, “is still concerned primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die. A theme no Christian need despise. Yet this theme plainly would not be so treated, but for the nearness of a pagan time. The shadow of its despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there. The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt. As the poet looks back into the past, surveying the history of kings and warriors in the old traditions, he sees that all the glory . . . ends in night. The solution of that tragedy is not treated- it does not arise out of the material. We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of despair.”

A poem from “a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit” – that gets the Beowulf poet’s stance exactly.