There’s an interesting problem at the beginning of the Old English poem Beowulf. The poem is of course about the Geatish hero named Beowulf who comes to the aid of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose court is being terrorized by the monster Grendel. At the beginning of the poem we are introduced to Hrothgar’s great-grandfather, Scyld Scefing, and his son Beowulf. But wait, this Danish Beowulf, Hrothgar’s grandfather, is NOT the titular character, the Geatish Beowulf. He is a totally insignificant character to the story, mentioned briefly in a few lines while talking about Hrothgar’s lineage. Why are there two characters named Beowulf in the same poem? Especially since “Beowulf” is a rare name; in all of the existing texts in Old English, it appears as the name of only three people, the two in this poem, and one real-life abbot.
This has been a point of much debate. J.R.R. Tolkien, who during his life was probably the world’s foremost authority on Beowulf, argued that the Danish Beowulf’s name was originally Beow. At some point a scribe who was not very familiar with the poem copied it, and encountering the name Beow, assumed it was an error and “corrected” it to Beowulf. (There is only one extant manuscript of the poem, so whatever the particular scribes who produced that manuscript wrote is all that we have.) This theory is supported by the fact that the names Scef (“sheaf”) and Beow (“barley”) appear as part of a single genealogy in several other works, and are obviously related semantically, perhaps originating in rustic folklore.
However there have been other proposals, including
- It’s just a coincidence that two unrelated characters in traditional stories had the same name, and when the Beowulf poet wrote his poem he kept the names.
- There was one original folklore hero named Beowulf, whose exploits became divided into two distinct stories (one Geatish and one Danish), and who were reunited in the Beowulf poem.
- The Beowulf poet gave these two characters the same name deliberately, for some literary purpose.
Tolkien considered all of these options and dismissed them in favor of the scribal error theory. Has anyone come across a convincing argument otherwise?