Bee-Wolf and the Hand of Victory: Identifying the Heroes of Beowulf and Vǫlsunga saga

Like all names in Beowulf, the name Beowulf may be either meaningless or intensely meaningful, depending upon the reader's disposition toward the poem. The protagonist's name can be part of the poet's carefully wrought allegorical schema, in which characters are given names that reflect an encoded judgment about their narrative function, personality, and ethics: this is Andy Orchard's position, when he writes that "if the Beowulf-poet did not invent the names … he certainly makes capital of their transparent meaning."¹ There has recently been a move against allegorical readings of personal names in Beowulf, however, by scholars such as Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, and Stefan Jurasinski.² Because Beowulf is an oral-traditional work, these critics propose that the poem's characters are normally inheritances from a pre-existing tradition rather than the product of an author's imagination, and, thus, are unlikely to owe their place in the poem to the meaning of their name. As R. D. Fulk summarizes the argument, "[P]alpable difficulties arise from the application of such an interpretative method to 'Beowulf' since it is demonstrable that many of the names derive from a long legendary tradition."³

This move against reading personal names as bearing potential meaning seems unnecessary. The ultimate origin or derivation of a character's name—whether it was created bespoke by an author to meet the needs of a narrative under construction or borrowed from a textual source or the author's own knowledge of the world—is separate from the use to which that name is put in a given textual situation. My starting point in this article is the suggestion that names in Beowulf are always sites of potential significance, without prejudice as to whether the poem's author invented them or deployed them on the basis of their etymologies. Beowulf can be read without paying any special regard to the characters' names, but to do so is to deny ourselves one source of hermeneutic value in a poem notably short of clues about how it expects us to read it. Plausible and useful readings of Beowulf—readings that open up new interpretative possibilities in the poem—have often been made on the basis that anthroponyms might carry some sort of significance. It is the immanent significance of two of these names—Beowulf and Sigemund—that I explore in this article.

Anglo-Saxons were certainly not unaware of the potential for meaningfulness that personal names possessed: indeed, a culture that held Isidore's Etymologiae in such high regard could hardly be blind to the richness of an etymological hermeneutic.⁴ Fred C. Robinson encouraged us to remember that

Anglo-Saxon writers rarely had control over the selection of names for their literary characters, for the names were usually received, along with the story, from tradition. The only way they could make use of name-meanings would be to tease from the dictated names some etymological senses which could be shown to be appropriate to the characters who bear them.⁵

Robinson cites as examples of this tendency Ælfric's etymologizing exegesis of Biblical names; Christ and Satan's gloss of the name Lucifer as leohtberende; Exodus's attempt at a literal translation of "Israel" as onriht Godes, and Bede's treatment in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Gregory the Great's Latin puns on English names. But all of these examples use etymology to interpret non-Old English names. They leave the impression that such onomastic interpretation was essentially a facet of the scholarly, Latinate, Christian culture of Anglo-Saxon England, rather than of the Germanic vernacular tradition—and they do not treat the dithematic structure of Old English personal names that is so prevalent in Beowulf.

More promising is the interpretation of the name Guthlac that Robinson cites from Felix's vita of the saint. Felix breaks the name down into its two themes, guð and lac, and recombines these concepts into the Latin phrase belli munus (reward of battle). Felix makes the etymology of Guthlac's name emblematize...