The poem we call Beowulf is the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and the foundation document of English literature. Set in sixth-century Scandinavia among the Geats, the Danes, and the Swedes, it tells the story of a Geatish prince who sails to Denmark as a young man, slays the monster Grendel in the great hall of Heorot, dives into a mere to kill Grendel’s mother, and then returns to his homeland to reign as king for fifty years. In his old age he fights a dragon, is fatally wounded, and dies king of his people. The poem is preserved in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex (British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, c. 1000), and the manuscript was nearly destroyed in the Cotton library fire of 1731. The poem was first transcribed and edited in 1787 by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin, who used the manuscript before the fire; without his two transcripts we would have a much more fragmentary poem.
The poem is a complex one. It is a heroic epic in the Germanic tradition, drawing on stories of the iron-age north; it is also a Christian poem, written down by Christian monks who recast the older story in the light of their own theology. The two dimensions are sometimes in tension, sometimes in harmony, and the reader is always aware of the layering. The result is one of the great works of European literature.
The Manuscript and the Date
The Nowell Codex is a collection of four Old English texts: The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and Beowulf itself. The manuscript dates from about the year 1000, but the poem in the form we have it was composed earlier, perhaps in the eighth or ninth century. The linguistic evidence places the original composition somewhere in the eighth century, possibly in the kingdom of Mercia or Wessex. The setting of the poem, however, is unambiguously Scandinavian: the heroes are Geats (a people in southern Sweden), Danes, and Swedes, and many of the names in the poem are known from Scandinavian historical tradition.
The poem is sometimes thought to have been composed by a single poet, but most scholars now believe it to be the work of a tradition, possibly written down by two or more Christian monks. The alliterative style, the use of kennings (poetic compound metaphors), and the long set-pieces (the lay of the harper, the lay of the warrior’s last battle) all suggest an oral-formulaic background, like the oral poetry of the Greek Homer or the Norse Volsungs.
The Hero: Beowulf son of Ecgtheow
The hero of the poem is Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, prince of the Geats, nephew of Hygelac, the king of the Geats. Ecgtheow had killed a man of the Wylfing clan and had to flee; he was received by Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, who paid the blood-price for him. Beowulf, as a young man, has heard of the trouble of Hrothgar’s hall: for twelve years the great hall of Heorot has been attacked by the monster Grendel, and Hrothgar’s warriors have been killed in their beds one by one. Beowulf, with a small band of chosen Geats, sails to Denmark to help.
The story of Beowulf’s youth is told partly by the poet and partly by the warriors’ boasts and lays. Beowulf is said to be the strongest man in the world, the greatest swimmer, the boldest fighter. The poet tells of Beowulf’s swimming contest with Breca, a prince of the Brondings: as young men, the two of all the Geats swam together for five nights in the open sea, fighting sea-monsters with their bare hands, and at the end Beowulf washed ashore in Finland. The story is one of the heroic exempla of the poem: the young hero’s strength tested against the elements and against the monsters of the deep.
The Slaying of Grendel
The great hall of Heorot (“the Hart”) is the setting of the poem’s first two-thirds. Heorot was built by Hrothgar, the Danish king, as a hall for his warriors — the largest hall in the northern world, with a roof of polished gold, towers reaching to the clouds, and a high seat for the king. The image of Heorot is the image of the heroic age: the great hall where the warriors drink mead, listen to the harper, and plan their wars. Twelve years before Beowulf’s arrival, however, the hall has been attacked by Grendel, a monster descended (in the Christian reading) from Cain, the first murderer. Grendel comes by night, seizes one of Hrothgar’s warriors, tears him apart, and eats him. He comes again and again, and the hall becomes empty.
Beowulf arrives with fourteen chosen Geats. He refuses the use of weapons in the fight: he will match Grendel’s lack of weapons with his own, and show his confidence. He and his men sleep in Heorot, and when Grendel comes the poet describes in one of the most famous scenes in English literature the monster’s grip, the hero’s grip, the tearing of the arm from the shoulder of the beast, the monster’s flight, and the arm hung from the roof of Heorot as a trophy. The fight is described in detail in the long-tail page on Beowulf vs Grendel.
The Descent into the Mere
The night after the slaying of Grendel, the hero must face a new enemy. Grendel’s mother, a sea-hag of even greater horror than her son, comes to Heorot to avenge her son’s death. She seizes Æschere, Hrothgar’s most trusted advisor, and carries him off to her underwater lair. Beowulf, now armed with a great sword made by giants of the past, pursues her into the mere. The descent into the mere is one of the great scenes of the poem: the hero swimming down into the depths, surrounded by sea-monsters, the waters boiling with blood, the strange light of the mere that is like the sun of a different world. The hero fights the sea-hag in her hall, finds that no ordinary weapon can pierce her skin, and at last uses the giant’s sword to behead her. He takes Grendel’s head as a trophy, and the giant’s sword-hilt as a gift to the king.
The episode of the mere is the model for many later descents in English literature. The image of the hero swimming down into a strange country, fighting monsters, and emerging with a trophy is one of the great patterns of the heroic imagination. The Greek Perseus does the same in his descent into the realm of the Gorgon, the Norse Odin in his descent into Mimir’s well, and the Celtic Cú Chulainn in his descent into the otherworld.
The Return to Geatland and the Reign
Beowulf returns to Geatland laden with gifts. He gives Hrothgar’s queen, Wealhtheow, the hilt of the giant’s sword; he is reconciled with Hrothgar in a famous scene; and he sails home. There he becomes king of the Geats after the death of his uncle Hygelac and his son Heardred in wars with the Swedes and the Franks. He reigns for fifty years, and his realm is at peace. The middle of the poem — the long, sometimes tedious, account of the hero’s reign — is sometimes thought to be a later addition to the older story. It is also one of the great parts of the poem, in which the older heroic ideal is given its Christian form: the king who rules in wisdom, protects his people, and prepares for his own death.
The Dragon Fight
The end of the poem is the dragon fight. A dragon has been sleeping for three hundred years on a great treasure-hoard in a barrow in the Geatish waste. A fugitive slave, fleeing his master’s wrath, steals a golden cup from the hoard to appease his lord, and the dragon wakes. It begins to ravage the Geatish countryside, burning the king’s hall, devouring his warriors, and breathing fire on his lands. Beowulf, now an old king, decides to fight it.
The fight is long and terrible. Beowulf is no longer the youthful swimmer of the sea-contest with Breca. His strength is the strength of a king of fifty years, not the strength of a young man. He and his young companion Wiglaf enter the dragon’s barrow; Wiglaf’s shield catches the dragon’s fire; Beowulf strikes the dragon with his sword, but the sword breaks. The dragon seizes Beowulf by the neck, and the king is burned by the fire. Wiglaf, the only one of the warriors who has not fled, stabs the dragon from below, and Beowulf, in his last moment of strength, drives his knife into the dragon’s belly. The dragon is killed. Beowulf is dying.
His last words are the great words of the poem. He thanks God that he has been allowed to win the treasure for his people. He gives Wiglaf his golden collar and his war-shirt. He tells Wiglaf that he is the last of the Volungs, the last of the older line. He asks to be buried on the headland of Hronesness, with a great barrow, so that the sailors of the future may see it and remember his name. He dies.
The Funeral Pyre
The funeral of Beowulf is the most famous of the Old English poems. The Geats build a great pyre on the headland and burn the body, with the dragon’s treasure beside it. They build a barrow of stones on the cliff, visible to all sailors. The poet ends with the famous words: “They said that of all the kings of the world, he was the mildest of men and the most gentle, the most gracious to his people and the most eager for fame.” The image of the king’s pyre on the headland is one of the most powerful in English literature and is the model for many later hero-funerals in the English tradition, including the funeral of Arthur in the Arthurian tradition and the funeral of the Red Cross Knight in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
The Cultural Legacy
Beowulf has had a long and varied afterlife in English literature. The poem was rediscovered in the early eighteenth century and transcribed into Danish by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin in 1787 (his two transcripts preserve passages now lost in the fire-damaged manuscript). The first English translation was published by John Mitchell Kemble in 1833, followed by Benjamin Thorpe in 1855 and others. J. R. R. Tolkien’s own prose translation, completed in 1926 during his time as a young Oxford don, was finally published in 2014, edited by his son Christopher Tolkien nearly half a century after his death in 1973. The most influential modern English translations include those of W. P. Ker, R. K. Gordon, David Wright, Burton Raffel, and Seamus Heaney, whose 1999 verse translation became the bestselling edition in the poem’s history.
The poem’s influence on J. R. R. Tolkien is especially deep. Tolkien was a long-time reader of the poem; he used to read it aloud in Old English to his students at Oxford, and his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is one of the founding documents of modern fantasy criticism. The influence of the poem on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is unmistakable: the dragon Smaug, the treasure-hoard, the death of the king on a pyre, the long barrow on the headland — all are the children of Beowulf. The image of the dragon as the last and greatest enemy, the enemy of the king and the people, is the central image of the poem and the central image of Tolkien’s work as well.
The poem has also had a wide influence on modern fantasy and science fiction. The image of the hero who slays the monster in the great hall, and the image of the king who dies fighting the dragon, are at the heart of the modern fantasy tradition. The image of the treasure-hoard and the dragon, the descent into the mere, the death of the king on the pyre, the barrow on the headland — all of these are part of the vocabulary of the modern fantasy.
Sources
The poem is preserved only in the Nowell Codex. The two transcriptions of Thorkelin (1787) are independent of the damaged manuscript and preserve passages now illegible. The most important editions of the poem are those of Friedrich Klaeber, W. P. Ker, E. V. Gordon, and Kevin Kiernan. The most important modern translations are those of David Wright, Burton Raffel, Michael Alexander, and Seamus Heaney. The poem has been the subject of a vast scholarly literature, including the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair Campbell, R. W. Burchfield, and many others.
Last reviewed: June 2026.