Something novel always seems to catch my attention in each of my many encounters with the Beowulf poem. Composed between 600-900 CE but transcribed some time later, although this greatest (and only extant) example of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry is clearly medieval in its textual origin, its sensibilities always strike me as equally pagan and biblical. This last statement might strike a reader as platitudinous considering that all of medieval literary culture presents an often uneasy synthesis of the pagan and the biblical. However in considering Beowulf both of these influences are evinced in unique ways.
One salient detail that punctuates the above dynamic is the symbolic place that weaponry in general and swords in particular "wield" (pun intended :)) in the narrative. Upon arriving in Grendel-ravaged Heorot, Beowulf vows to vanquish Grendel without the use of weapons because the monster himself, “waepna ne recceth” (v. 434). As we learn later, Grendel is impervious to blades (vv. 709-802), so this choice was indeed a serendipitous one for Beowulf, but might there be more to Beowulf's choice than mere serendipity? As the text imagines in its own poetic interpretation of biblical events, Cain kills Abel with a sword (though in the Bible, Cain simply "rises against" Abel and "kills him"; see Gen 4:8) and the consequence is the birth and banishment of the Grendelkin to somewhere beneath the surface into the mere. Furthermore, in his battle with Grendel's Mother Beowulf does wield Hrunting, a sword given to him by the deceitful Unferth that ends up failing Beowulf and melting in Grendel's Mother's skin. Beowulf ultimately kills Grendel's Mother only through the use of a sword he finds in her lair itself. The question that seems to arise is whether the scribe/scop seeks to impart a message about the sword as a metonym of pride, or rather perhaps he seeks to convey a similar idea through the very lack of weaponry itself. Like a biblical text, Beowulf is "fraught with background"--to quote our friend Erich Auerbach again, but like the romances that follow it and other texts from the medieval world, swords and chivalry exert a cultural meaning that cannot be overlooked.
Ultimately, one of the poem's more explicit morals centers around what it means to be a good king (see for example the famous declaration concerning figures from Scyld Shielding to Hrothgar as "god cyning"), nevertheless one of its many implicit excursuses is to contrast a good king with a good thane or warrior. Verse 20-25 contain an injunction that a prince, or retainer, should give freely of himself in battle while his father is a live--that is, when he is young--in order that his men will defend him once he has become aged. One should extrapolate from this passage that a good king knows his limitations and only fights to earn glory earlier in life, or to display his prowess in order to prove his fitness for kingship. For all of its blood, gore, and marrow, Beowulf's world is a vibrantly social one in which the ties of kinship and fealty are paramount. Thus the Grendelkin's outsider status might even be tied to their lack of skill or deliberate choice not to use weapons in battle. Beowulf as the paradigmatic warrior/thane chooses to fight without a weapon for the sake of his fame, but we might conjecture that Hrothgar in his aged and increasingly impotent state would in fact be negligent not to bring a weapon to battle.
I am not quite sure the import of weaponry in this text and, much like the rest of this nebulously beautiful poem, think the question of weapons requires much more reflection and rereading. Perhaps we could make a compelling argument based on further readings in the OE corpus, particularly the Anglo-Saxon "translations" of the Bible. In the meantime, let's ruminate on the quiddity of hwaet.
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