The Cambridge Old English Reader

The telling of tales is one of the world's oldest professions. In pre-literate societies it was the bard, minstrel, poet or (to use an OE term) scop on whom the roles not only of entertainer but also of historian fell. The oral poet was the keeper of the collective memory and transmitter of the narratives which recreated a nation's or tribe's past and the achievements of its heroes, and thereby forged its present sense of identity. The OE poem known as Widsith, which is a sort of catalogue of the professional poet's repertoire, shows this well, and so does Deor, given below in section VI (Text 36).

The poet of Beowulf, too, never misses the chance to promote his own craft within his story. After Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, the monster's blood is hardly dry on the ground before a bard among the Danish king's thegns is produced to commemorate the hero's exploit in song (Text 31a). Then, that same evening, a minstrel performs at a celebratory feast, applying a timely check on the triumphalism of the occasion by telling the sad tale of the Danish princess Hildeburh's ill-fated marriage to Finn of the Frisians (Text 31b). It is a reminder to the Danes of how sorrow invariably seems to follow joy, and the allusive way in which this tale is told shows that the Beowulf-poet's audience were thoroughly familiar with it. Indeed, they may have known it from a version of another OE poem which has come down to us, though only in a fragment – The Fight at Finnsburh (Text 32). The surviving lines present a blow-by-blow account of an encounter between Danes and Frisians which is only lightly sketched in the longer poem. In Beowulf, the arrival of Grendel's mother to avenge her son after the Danish celebrations proves the minstrel's point about changing fortunes. The details of Beowulf's subsequent tracking down and killing of this she-monster suggest how close in character monsters and heroes may be (Text 31c). They illustrate, too, with the inclusion of an episode of divine intervention to enable the hero to complete his task, how Christianity can be used to colour a tale of the Germanic pagan world without diminishing it.