The approach to the dragon-fight in Beowulf, Aldhelm, and the 'traditions folkloriques' of Jacques Le Goff

The approach to the dragon-fight in Beowulf, Aldhelm, and the 'traditions folkloriques' of Jacques Le Goff l In a stimulating and wide-ranging article published in 1982 Michael Lapidge assembled an impressive quantity of evidence that would assign the origin and transmission of Beowulf to early Wessex and in particular would link the poem to the chcle of Aldhelm, the scholarly bishop of Sherborne who died ca 709. Lapidge suggests that Aldhelm was familiar with vernacular verse on the subject of dragons, and that, although there are some differences between the dragon in Beowulf and the dragons depicted in Aldhelm's opus geminatum on heroic virginity, there are also significant similarities, especially in the treatment of combat between a dragon and a hero or a saint. In both cases, the dragons are conceived of as the enemy of an entire people, implacably hostile to mankind, a mighty adversary for a heroic deliverer. Lapidge concludes: It is possible, then, that Aldhelm's conception of the role of dragons was determined by his familiarity with accounts in Old English of encounters between dragons and heroes, such as those we find in Beowulf.1 Although Lapidge's comments are unexceptionable in themselves, and I do not seek to undermine his suggestion of a link between the poem and preConquest Wessex (which seems quite plausible), I want in this paper to draw attention to some significant differences between the conception of dragoncombats in Aldhelm and the Beowulf-poet, differences which in m y opinion reflect two separate strands of literary and cultural tradition on which the respective authors were able to draw. The key to understanding these different traditions seems to m e to lie in the depiction of significant relationships, not only that between the hero/saint and the persecuted people (where, as Lapidge has noted, the former is characterized as a national saviour) but in the relationship between the monster and its physical 1 Michael Lapidge, '"Beowulf, Aldhelm, the "Liber Monstrorum" and Wessex', Studi Medievali, 3rd series 23 (1982), 151-92: 161-62. P A R E R G O N ns 12.1 (July 1994) 58 P. Sorrell environment and the way this relationship is changed by the hero's intervention and the dragon's defeat2 Anglo-Saxon thought posits an essential relationship between an animal and the typical habitat in which it carries on the activity that is characteristic of it.3 In the case of the Beowulfian dragon, the affinity between animal and environment is communicated in a variety of ways. As has often been noted, the gnomic formulation in Maxims II, Ibh-lla ('Draca sceal on hkewe,/ frod, fraetwum wlanc')findsan echo in Beowulf, where the poet's account of the dragon's discovery of the hoard at 2270b-77 modulates into gnomic statement as his observations shift from the past to the present tense: Hordwynne fond eald uhtsceafia opene standan, se 6e byrnende biorgas secefi, nacod niCdraca, nihtes fleogefi fyre befangen; hyne foldbuend (swifie ondrae)da(6). He gesecean sceall (ho)r(d on) hrusan, 8ser he haeSen gold 1 The fullest study of the dragon in Beowulf is still Friedrich Wild, Drochen im 'Beowulf und undere Drochen, Osterreichische Akodomie der Wissenschqft,phil.hist . Klosse 238/5, Vienna, 1962. K. Sisam's paper, 'Beowulf s Fight with the Dragon', Review of English Studies (RES) ns 9 (1958), 129-40, is a very perceptive reading; and A. K. Brown, 'The Firedrake in Beowulf, Neophilologus 64 (1980), 439-60, Robert Lawrence Schichler, 'Heorot and Dragon-Slaying in Beowulf, Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Conference 11 (1986), 159-75, and Claude Lecouteux, 'Der Drache', Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 108 (1979), 13-31, should also be consulted. On combats between dragons and saints see, in addition to the studies by Jacques Le Goff cited below, the older studies in C. Cahier, Caractiristiques des saints dans Vart populaire, 2 vols., Paris, 1867, 1, pp. 315-22; and M . Meyer, 'Ober die Verwandschaft heidnischer und christlicher Drachentodter', in Verhandlungen der XL Versammlung deutscher Philologen, Leipzig, 1890, pp. 336 ff. For a recent general survey see U w e Steffen, Drachenkampf: der Mythos vom Bosen, Stuttgart, 1984. A...