What do you think about the two Beowulfs?

Cafe Society
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1

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?

2

For comparison, the Iliad has two characters named “Ajax” (or “two Aiantes”, as the Brittanica translation very confusingly said without explanation).

Is the name “Beowulf” etymologically related to “Beow”?

3

In the History of English podcast by Kevin Stroud, there’s some speculation that the name Beowulf was somewhat contrived, needed for the rhythm scheme of the story. The name could have been a mash-up of “beo-” for bee, and “wulf” for wolf; a ‘bee wolf’ or more simply “Bear”. So how common was the name “Bear” in early Anglo Saxon times, and was the same rhythm scheme needed in the various places in the story? The podcast doesn’t say, and I myself have no idea.

4

I think there’s no doubt that “Beowulf” (bee-wolf) is a kenning for “bear”. Tolkien says the character originated in a fairy story about a clumsy oaf who causes chaos by his inability to control his superhuman bear-like strength, then redeems himself by killing a monster. The name is etymologically unrelated to “beow” (barley).

Tolkien says “the unfortunate ‘chance’ that placed a character in the genealogy of the Scyldings with a name that began with the same letters as Beowulf, the fairy-story hero, has with the aid of two scribes both extremely ignorant of and careless of proper names … produced one of the reddest and highest red herrings that were ever dragged across a literary trail.”

ETA: Tolkien also says the lines that mention Hrothgar’s ancestor scan better with the name “Beow” than “Beowulf” but doesn’t consider that definitive because Old English meter allows some license with proper names.

5

(Ooh. I believe I wandered into the wrong classroom. I’ll see myself out.)

6

I don’t have an opinion on the subject, but here’s a couple of relevant passages from a scholarly work:

The next assumption I make is the correctness of Kemble’s
identification of Beowulf the Dane, son of Scyld Scefing, as Beow
of the genealogies. “The divinity of the earlier Beowulf”, Kemble
says, "I hold for indisputable… . Beo or Beow is . . . in all prob-
ability a god of agriculture and fertility… It strengthens this
view of the case that he is the grandson of Sceaf, manipulus
frumenti, with whom he is perhaps in fact identical."14
Chambers accepts this identification of Beowulf the Dane with Beow, a corn
god, and observes that whether or not Beow and Sceaf were ever
actually identical, “it is certain that Beow (grain) the descendant
of Sceaf (sheaf) suggests a corn-myth, some survival from the an-
cient worship of a corn-spirit”.15 And Chambers even goes further
to apply the mythical vestige to the poem itself. “That Sceaf”,
he says, “should be, in the language of Miillenhoff, ‘placed in a
boat and committed to the winds and waves in the hope that he
will return new-born in the spring’ is exactly what we might ex-
pect, from the analogy of harvest customs and myths of the coming
of spring.” (160)

One important question which arises in the interpretation which
I suggest is the initial knot of identity of names. Kemble shows
that Northern folklore amply reveals that Beowulf (or Beo, Beow,
Beaw), son of Scyld, was, like his father, regarded as the epony-
mous head of various royal races.32 (170)

Betty S. Cox. Cruces of Beowulf. De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. (Reprint of 1971 publication)

Footnotes 14 and 32 refer to Kemble, John Mitchell, The Saxons in England, 2 vols., Rev. (London, 1876)

Footnote 15 refers to
R. K. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, 3rd. ed. (Cam-
bridge, 1959).

7

Meanwhile, what’s known about that third Beowulf, the abbot? Did he live late enough that he might plausibly have been named after the hero of the poem?Or was there some other reason for him to be named with a bear-kenning?

8

Thanks for that. I found Chambers’ * Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem on Project Gutenberg and it looks very interesting. Chambers was a friend and colleague of Tolkien.

9

Apparently almost nothing is known about the abbot. His name is merely mentioned in the Liber Vitae of Durham. This is a book listing people who donated to or visited the church in Durham, and the bare listing of his name is all that is said about him. The book was started in the 9th century with some later entries. I haven’t been able to find anything indicating exactly when the abbot’s name (in the form “Biuulf”) was entered. The date of the composition of the poem Beowulf is contested, but was probably in the 8th or 9th century, but built from earlier material, so the abbot’s name probably postdates the poem. Whether he was named for the poem’s protagonist or whether both names came from an earlier source seems impossible to say.

10

How many names do we have from Old English? And how many of those only appear once? I think “rare” is relative, for a corpus of literally only 400 texts.

11

In real life we may know many Brians, a few Janes and even several Jesuses, but as purely a story-telling device, writers usually avoid having two characters with the same name. One of the rare modern works where that happens is Arrested Development, where they use it as, I suspect, deliberate convention breaking.

That may lend weight to the idea of Beow + Beowulf being originally distinct names for the purposes of telling a ripping yarn until some copyist scribed up.

12

Okay, I don’t care to sound absolutely clueless, but I’m still confused. “Beowulf” is acknowledged to be a poetic rendering of “bear”. “Beow” itself comes from the name of a grain god, and I don’t doubt that it would be important to show proper respect to that god.

It also seems to me that the name “Bear” all by itself would be a proper, maybe even common warrior’s name. Was it? I know enough German to recognize that the word is quite similar in German and English, so it’s reasonable to me that it was the same word in those older days. The guy’s name is Bear (same as the main hero’s name, really), and the bard wants to mention it in a separate call-out in the current story. What the heck, just call both of them “bee wolf” 'cause that’s simpler to remember and it fits in fine.

Could that be the source of some confusion? I know that I’m confused.

13

But the grain guy’s name wasn’t “Bear”, it was “Barley”. I don’t think I’m understanding your argument. If you were writing a story about a person named Emmanuel, and there was a minor character named Emma in it, would you change Emma’s name to Emmanuel also because it’s simpler to remember? Wouldn’t that just introduce unnecessary confusion?

14

Just wanted to chime in that the fact that we have the poem at all is incredibly amazing, and the fact that we know as much as we do about some barbarian language at the edge of the world is also amazing.

The actual word for bear (related to Latin “ursus” and Greek “arktos”) was taboo among the Germanic languages. The word “bear” is a euphemism meaning brown thing, similar to bee-wolf.

15

Apparently also related to Sanskrit “rakshasa”, a bestial demon.

16

Very true. The single manuscript was damaged in a fire in 1731 which destroyed a bunch of other books and could easily have destroyed this one, in which case we would today know nothing about the poem or that it even ever existed. It makes you wonder how much of Old English literature has vanished without a trace.

17

Oh. There never was a bear, only a grain god. I’m the one who was confused.

18

The relevant corpus isn’t quite that limited. There are also about 1,600 Anglo-Saxon charters, albeit mostly surviving only in later copies, and charters do tend to be even more likely to record personal names than literary texts.

Not quite. It had been briefly mentioned in print by Humfrey Wanley in 1705.

Beowulf’s Afterlives (tamu.edu)

19

I for sure don’t know, but you can find a list of both Norman and Anglo-Saxon names in the Domesday Book, compiled around 1086. Here’s a full list of those names., and it’s noteworthy to see the difference in landholdings as listed before and after the Norman Conquest.

20

Wait, there was only a single manuscript even as late as 1731!? I can understand copies being rare when making one required a team of bored monks, but three hundred years after Gutenberg?