The Hero Recovered: Essays on Medieval Heroism in Honor of George Clark ed. by Robin Waugh and James Weldon (review)

The editors have brought together thirteen original essays and other pieces to honor the teaching and scholarship of George Clark, Professor Emeritus of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Their purpose is to restore a clearer sense of the hero in early medieval Germanic literature, to rescue these beleaguered warriors from a challenge far greater than any they face in their own life stories, that is, to retain their social dignity and relevance in a postmodern age suspicious of their robust masculine virtues and obsolete martial values. The essays are organized into four groups: two on the Old English poems Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon; a third on the Icelandic sagas of Hrafnkell Freysgoði and Grettir Ásmundarson; and a fourth on other permutations of the northern hero—animal and human, male and female, young and old—from the Middle Ages to modern times.

In the first section, Sarah L. Higley examines “Thought in Beowulf and Our Perception of It: Interiority, Power, and the Problem of the Revealed Mind” (pp. 23–46). She notes the poet’s reticence in disclosing his hero’s inner feelings compared to the freedom with which he reveals the emotional life of other characters, including wordless monsters. Beowulf may speak at greater length than other figures in the poem, but his speeches are a performance of public resolve rather than a revelation of private thought. Yet, the poet sharply reverses this practice in the hero’s old age, uncovering Beowulf’s fear that he may have provoked the dragon’s attack through some moral failing of his own. His distress recalls that of Hrothgar at his parting from the young hero in Denmark years before: his breast “wells up inside with the greatest of mind-sorrows and dark thoughts that are foreign to him” (Higley’s emphasis, p. 37, comparing ll. 1870–80a and 2327b–32).

In “Transforming the Hero: Beowulf and the Conversion of Hunferth” (pp. 47–64), Judy King understands Beowulf’s heroism as a kind of moral evangelism modeled on saints’ lives. The hero not only rescues the Danes from monsters but also inspires a fundamental change of heart among them, beginning with Hrothgar’s spokesman Hunferth. King prefers the ethnophoric form of this character’s name “Hun-spirit” as it appears in the Beowulf manuscript, since as such it identifies him as a morally responsible agent rather than an emblematic figure of Unferth “Un-peace, Discord,” the unaspirated form of his name to which it is customarily emended for reasons of alliteration. For killing his brothers, the hero warns Hunferth that þu in helle scealt / werhðo dreogan (you must suffer damnation in hell) (ll. 588b–89a), a prediction whose second-person singular auxiliary of obligation scealt King massages from “must” to “deserve” in order to allow the possibility of repentance. She compares this rebuke to those delivered by Christian martyrs to their persecutors, some of whom subsequently convert. Hunferth signals his reformation by offering Hrunting to Beowulf, a sword tainted by the blood of his brothers, which is then washed in the waters of the mere. The conversion of Hunferth and “baptism” of Hrunting signify the conversion of the Danes as a whole from the fratricidal violence of pagan tribalism to the Christian heroism demonstrated by Beowulf.

John M. Hill discusses “The King and the Warrior: Hrothgar’s Sitting Masculinity” (pp. 65–82). Quoting Sahlins on Fijian kingship (1985), Hill distinguishes between kingly gravitas, “the venerable, staid, judicious, priestly, peaceful, and productive dispositions of an established people,” and heroic celeritas, “the youthful, active, disorderly, magical, and creative violence of conquering princes” (p. 66). Hrothgar not only demonstrates the stable continuity of the Scylding monarchy through time but also in some sense owns Beowulf’s victory over the Grendelkin, since it is in return for past favors that the young hero comes to serve the...