The previous chapter demonstrated that Beowulf, the most significant source of information concerning performance in the Old English poetic imagination, represents performance thematically, but diversely. From archetypal scop figures to the characters without identifiers relating to their role as performers, Beowulf depicts a world in which performance is integral to society. Though commonly they are brief allusions, what might be seen as uniform references to performance activity, each in fact has differing purposes and effects. These glimpses of performance in the poem mirror the terse allusions in wisdom poetry, material considered in Chapter 5, with performers represented as positive agents who possess the knowledge and ability to perform effectively. The difference in Beowulf is that these allusions interrelate with the poem’s narrative and structural concerns, implying a close relationship with a type of oral poetics that relied on interrelationships between thematically distinctive yet formally associated material. Moreover, in Beowulf traditional poetic themes are utilised in unique ways, notably for example in the way in which the beasts of battle ‘perform’. Performance’s function shifts too as the poem progresses. Whereas the þegn and the scopas symbolise the social cohesion and successes of the Geats and Danes in the first third, mourners represent social decline after the fifty-year jump, in keeping with the poem’s overall shift in tone. As this chapter will demonstrate, the lyre as symbolic object represents this shift most evidently.

The Lyre as Symbol

Referring to the representation of human society in Beowulf, Tolkien describes the poem’s contrasting environments, represented by the presence or absence of light and music:

Present in two episodes discussed in the previous chapter – the joy in the hall that enrages Grendel and before the tale of the Frisian slaughter, and alluded to by the Geatish messenger at the end of his long speech – the ‘harp’, likely the Germanic round lyre, is the symbolic musical instrument of performance in Beowulf, and in Old English poems more generally.