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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Purely Literary rather than historical evidence should not be excluded if it helps to solve a problem, or even if it merely sharpens the sense of such a problem as the meaning of the dragon in Beowulf.
Some difficulty has probably been caused by thinking of the dragon as a symbol rather than as some other kind of image although, to be sure, a hard-and-fast distinction may not always be possible. To me the meaning of a symbol is more or less arbitrary, especially because the symbol represents something, or means something, usually quite unlike itself–as the eagle is physically unlike the United States. This meaning is imposed outside the work of art rather than within it. Such meaning has to be agreed upon, either by authors like Blake or Yeats in contracts with themselves which must sooner or later be registered with the people, or else by the folk in some other manner, as when they agree in a ‘religious’ community that, say, Ceres shall represent corn and harvesting. Once agreed upon, the meaning of the symbol must remain fixed, at least in the community; otherwise, communication will be confused. Of course, the determination of a symbol's meaning can only be by external evidence. Such meaning probably depends upon remote associations which are certainly not immediately available to the reader and which are, possibly, not always exactly available even to the writer, as in surrealism. These associations can often be recovered, no doubt, and the reason for the meaning can then be understood. But at least until one examines the creative processes behind the evolution of the symbol, its meaning must seem artificial.
1 This article was written originally immediately after I had read Adrien Bonjour, “Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 304–312. I had to withhold it until now, however, because I was worried about the possibility that there might be a 6th means by which an image could get meaning. (See n. 2 below.) Of course I have had ulterior motives for being interested, the views herein presented being support for some of the views in my article, “The Unity of Beowulf,” PMLA, xlix (1934), 374–405.
2 I once thought I had a 6th source of meaning for images, in a kind of induction by means of which actualities like Guernseys and Herefords are transcended by the idea bos, also a product of the imagination, since nobody has ever seen a bos. But this process, though meaningful and important, does not now seem to me exclusive.
3 Not only does Grendel have a glof made of dragon skin, as Bonjour has pointed out. After the dam's death Beowulf is favorably, but ironically, compared with Sigemund, a great dragon killer.
4 The Geat achieves temporary peace in Denmark, preceded and followed by something like civil war. That there was a pro-Danish (Hreþling), and pro-Swedish (Waegmunding) faction in Geatland seems plausible. The pro-Danish faction would be weakened by the downfall of Hroþgar and his son, the burning of Heorot, etc. I am inclined to believe that 1. 3005 (aefter haeleþa hryre, hwate scildingas) is no intrusion.
5 I have in mind, particularly, Arthur G. Brodeur's “The Structure and Unity of Beowulf,” a sensitive work (PMLA, lxviii [1953], 1183–96), and Kemp Malone's incomparable “Beowulf' (Eng. Stud., xxix [1948], 161–172).
