The authenticating voice in Beowulf

Abstract

Two major concerns of recent Beowulf criticism have been (1) to establish the extent to which the poet used his pagan heroic narrative to shadow forth Christian meaning and (2) to establish the exact attitude of the poet towards his hero and towards the social institutions and mores of his hero's day – which, as we know, was several centuries before the poet's own. A nexus of such considerations has been the last word of the poem, lofgeornost: in the concluding lines the poet reports that the mourning Geats said that …he wære wyruldcyning[a] manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust, leodum liðost ond lofgeornost. (3180–2) There have been arguments on the basis of other contextual uses of lofgeorn that this word for ‘most eager for praise’ must have an unfavourable connotation here in Beowulf and hence carry the implication of a moral flaw in the hero, though these arguments have not, in my opinion, been convincing. But even if we accept a favourable connotation in this instance, since Beowulf's warriors would hardly be speaking ill of their fallen chieftain during his funeral rites, we still have the problem of deciding whether the poet himself was being sympathetic towards the warriors' view, or whether he was taking an ironic stance or attitude towards that praise from his undeniably Christian outlook.

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