Section III. Theories as to the structure of "Beowulf."
Certain peculiarities in the structure of Beowulf can hardly fail to strike the reader. (1) The poem is not a biography of Beowulf, nor yet an episode in his life: it is two distinct episodes: the Grendel business and the dragon business, joined by a narrow bridge. (2) Both these stories are broken in upon by digressions: some of these concern Beowulf himself, so that we get a fairly complete idea of the life of our hero: but for the most part these digressions are not strictly apposite. (3) Even apart from these digressions, the narrative is often hampered: the poet begins his story, diverges and returns. (4) The traces of Christian thought and knowledge which meet us from time to time seem to belong to a different world from that of the Germanic life in which our poem has its roots.
Now in the middle of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the great epics of the world had been formed from collections of original shorter lays fitted together (often unskilfully) by later redactors. For a critic starting from this assumption, better material than the Beowulf could hardly be found. And it was with such assumptions that Carl Müllenhoff, the greatest of the scholars who have dissected the Beowulf, set to work. He attended the lectures of Lachmann, and formed,
a biographer tells us, the fixed resolve to do for one epic what his admired master had done for another[[256]].
Müllenhoff claimed for his theories that they were simple[[257]] and straightforward: and so they were, if we may be allowed to assume as a basis that the Beowulf is made up out of shorter lays, and that the only business of the critic is to define the scope of these lays. In the story of Beowulf's fight with Grendel (ll. 194-836: Müllenhoff's Sect. I) and with the dragon (ll. 2200-3183: Müllenhoff's Sect. IV) Müllenhoff saw the much interpolated remains of two original lays by different authors. But, before it was united to the dragon story, the Grendel story, Müllenhoff held, had already undergone many interpolations and additions. The story of Grendel's mother (ll. 837-1623: Sect. II) was added, Müllenhoff held, by one continuator as a sequel to the story of Grendel, and ll. 1-193 were added by another hand as an introduction. Then this Grendel story was finally rounded off by an interpolator (A) who added the account of Beowulf's return home (Sect. III, ll. 1629-2199) and at the same time inserted passages into the poem throughout. Finally came Interpolator B, who was the first to combine the Grendel story, thus elaborated, with the dragon story. Interpolator B was responsible for the great bulk of the interpolations: episodes from other cycles and "theologizing" matter.
Ten Brink, like Müllenhoff, regarded the poem as falling into four sections: the Grendel fight, the fight with Grendel's mother, the return home, the dragon fight. But Müllenhoff had imagined the epic composed out of one set of lays: incoherences, he thought, were due to the bungling of successive interpolators. Ten Brink assumed that in the case of all three fights, with Grendel, with Grendel's mother, and with the dragon, there had been two parallel versions, which a later redactor had combined together, and that it was to this combination that the frequent repetitions in the
narrative were due: he believed that not only were the different episodes of the poem originally distinct, but that each episode was compounded of two originally distinct lays, combined together.
Now it cannot be denied that the process postulated by Müllenhoff might have taken place: a lay on Grendel and a lay on the dragon-fight might have been combined by some later compiler. Ten Brink's theory, too, is inherently not improbable: that there should have been two or more versions current of a popular story is probable enough: that a scribe should have tried to fit these two parallel versions together is not without precedent: very good examples of such attempts at harmonizing different versions can be got from an examination of the MSS of Piers Plowman.
It is only here and there that we are struck by an inherent improbability in Müllenhoff's scheme. Thus the form in which Müllenhoff assumes the poem to have existed before Interpolator A set to work on it, is hardly a credible one. The "original poet" has brought Beowulf from his home to the Danish court, to slay Grendel, and the "continuator" has taken him to the haunted lake: Beowulf has plunged down, slain Grendel's mother, come back to land. Here Müllenhoff believed the poem to have ended, until "Interpolator A" came along, and told how Beowulf returned in triumph to Hrothgar, was thanked and rewarded, and then betook himself home, and was welcomed by Hygelac. That it would have been left to an interpolator to supply what from the old point of view was so necessary a part of the story as the return to Hrothgar is an assumption perilous indeed. "An epic poem only closes when everything is really concluded: not, like a modern novel, at a point where the reader can imagine the rest for himself[[258]]."