Study Guide
Beowulf

No paper due. Instead, an in-class discussion.
Please prepare by reading the complete text of Beowulf.

Some questions to consider:

1. Is Grendel Beowulf's battle?  At what point does Beowulf himself have a legitimate cause against Grendel, and what is that cause?
2. What is Grendel's cause against Hrothgar?
3. Explain the legal justification for Grendel's mother seizing Aeschere.
4. What is the dragon's job?  What is Beowulf's, as king?
5. Discuss the ethic of vengeance in Beowulf.
6. Discuss the alliances in the Baltic region, as described (obliquely) in the text: Danes - Geats vs. Friesians - Franks - Swedes.
7. At 3150-55 a Geat woman's lament: she knows the Swedes are coming.  Sort out the blood-feud between the Swedes and the Geats.
8. Discuss the role of women as "peace-weavers."  Why does Beowulf doubt that the alliance between the Heathobards and Danes will last?

The epic of Beowulf is organized around three action scenes, but the real substance of the text is in the connecting material in between: Stories told of the past; alliances and feuds described. 

• The names are very difficult, all those Hroth-, Hyg-. Heardr-, Ean-, Ead-, Othe-, One-, etc. 
• At the back of your text, a genealogy illustrates the relationships between the noble houses of the different nations. 
• This map shows their geographic locations. 

  Sort these relationships out.  Spend some time with the text, beyond the crowd-pleasing action scenes.  Consider how a historian might use this text to gain access to the past; after all, this is why the epic was written down in the first place, after surviving for several hundred years in oral memory.

Guide to the text
organized by topic

Other tidbits