William Whallon - The Christianity of "Beowulf" + The Idea of God in Beowulf

Related:

“Beowulf: The Harrowing of Heorot, A Literary Analysis.”

The Nephilim in Beowulf | Richard Rohlin & Jonathan Pageau.

Beowulf – Literature versus Oral Tradition.

The Dating of Beowulf And Why It Matters.

Beowulf: How A Legendary Poem Offers A Portal To Our Ancient Past.

J R R Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics.

Julian Glover reads Beowulf.

Beowulf’s Descent Into The Underworld.

II.

An excerpt from, “The Christianity of “Beowulf” by William Whallon, Modern Philology, November 1962:

The agents for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons are well known. First among them is the sixth-century Irish saint Columba, who founded Iona, from which a later generation extended Christianity to the Thames. The second agent is Augustine (not the Church Father but a namesake), whom in 596 his one-time cell mate Pope Gregory directed to Kent, where a mission flourished as long as the missionary lived but afterwards declined, perhaps owing to the inability or the reluctance of his successors to learn the language of the island. The third and major agent is Aldhelm, who combined the Celtic and the Roman strains of Christianity in his training, under Maeldubh at Malmesbury, and then under the African Hadrian and the Asiatic Greek Theodore, who had both been sent as reinforcements to Canterbury by Pope Vitalian. If Beowulf, in spite of its mixture of dialectical forms, is thought transcribed in West-Saxon, it appears likely to have been washed in the religious currents created by Aldhelm, who was the greatest apostle in Wessex during the later seventh century and into the time of Bede. But thoroughgoing disagreement persists with regard to the kind of Christianity the epic contains, partly because there is no explicit mention of relics or the mass or the Virgin or Christ Himself, and partly because the funeral pyres and the credence in wyrd are remnants of heathenism. The tendency today is toward discovering a high degree of religious sophistication, but it may be possible to demur, as this paper will seek to do, with the suggestion that the epic knows little of Christianity besides two stories from the first nine chapters of Genesis.

An excerpt from, “Inconsistencies: Studies in the New Testament, the Inferno, Othello, and Beowulf” By William Whallon, from the chapter, “When in Beowulf is beer drunk, or mead, when ale or wine?” pg. 89-90:

The Anglo-Saxons once believed in god, lord, father, wyrd, and metod—terms perhaps not wholly synonymous, but capable of being often used one for another. They also believed in the powers we remember with our weekdays. Then Christianity made its conquest, not with Carolingian beheadings but with reinterpretation. The conversion was to be a reformation, not a revolution. Tiw, Woden, and Thunor had to be removed, condemned as devils. God, lord, and father were kept, but given, little by little, a Levantine sense to replace the Nordic one. Christ would come soon, when the way had been prepared. So much may be surmised from Beowulf, in comparison on the one hand with Old Norse poetry, and on the other with Old English poetry of a more intense Christian colour. Now wyrd and metod, truly Germanic and heathen, not at all Hebraic or Hellenistic, why were not they too driven underground, along with Tiw and that lot? Because poets, even if au courant in religious thought, were old-fashioned in their craft. Ancient resources for referring to the almighty could could not be given up until equally valuable new resources were available. Wyrd and metod were locked in the language by the need to alliterate on w and m, just as wine and mead were.

An excerpt from, “The Idea of God in Beowulf” by William Whallon, PMLA, March 1965:

In his rewarding and influential papers entitled “Die christlichen elemente im Beowulf,” Fr. Klaeber stressed the importance of Latin Scriptural and liturgical analogues to several Old English phrases, and no one would deny that the correspondence between the two groups of expressions is frequently exact. But recent studies into the structure of the verse itself show cause for regarding the religious elements as essentially Germanic.

. . .What may be significant is the absence from Beowulf of the northern divinities known in OE (Old English) as Woden, Tiw, and Thunor—who probably answer to both the Mercury, Hercules, and Mars mentioned by Tacitus as the gods to whom the Germanic tribes made sacrifice (Germania 9) and the daemones of cult-worship in England to whom were made the sacrifices condemned by Bede (Hist. Eccles. I.30). Since converts to the religious movement of the seventh century sometimes reverted to these rites—as is manifest from well-known passages in Bede (Hist. Eccles. ii.5 and iii.30) and Beowulf itself (lines 175-188)—the gods lacking in OE poetry but familiar from the Edda may be thought the chief element of the native belief that could not be accommodated by the monotheism of a more recent time. The first commandment of the decalogue was accordingly fulfilled, but Woden was condemned with a corollary encouragement to have faith in god, and to a contemporary this change must have been less a revolution than a reformation. For the words faeder, alwalda, and metod are as biblical as pater, omnipotens, and fatum are in the Aeneid, and Beowulf is to this extent neither Christian nor unchristian but pre-Christian.