50 Fun Facts About Beowulf

How many alliterative lines does the poem Beowulf contain?

Nobody knows the poet's name and the manuscript carries no title; the poem is simply called after its hero.

Beowulf is a hero of which people?

Their homeland is usually placed in what is now Götaland in southern Sweden. He sails from there to help the Danish king.

For how many years had Grendel been attacking Hrothgar's mead hall before Beowulf arrived?

The Danes had abandoned the hall at night. Grendel is said to be tormented by the sound of singing and joy coming from it.

What is the name of the great mead hall King Hrothgar built for himself and his warriors?

The Old English name means 'hart' or 'stag'. Excavations at Lejre, where tradition placed the hall, turned up a real mid-6th-century hall about 50 metres long.

Grendel is described in the poem as a descendant of which biblical figure?

That lineage puts him among the exiled monsters and giants of the Cain tradition. Whether he is a giant, a troll or something else is never spelled out.

How does Beowulf kill Grendel?

Beowulf uses neither weapon nor armour in the fight. He hangs the whole shoulder and arm up in the hall for all to see, which is what enrages Grendel's mother.

Which of Hrothgar's men, his most loyal advisor, is killed by Grendel's mother on her revenge raid?

She carries him off and later leaves his head outside her lair, which is under a lake.

Which sword, lent to Beowulf before he dives into the mere, proves useless against Grendel's mother?

She throws him down and tries to kill him with a short sword; his armour saves him. He finishes her with an ancient giant's sword he finds in the cave.

Which Danish courtier taunts Beowulf about a youthful swimming contest and later lends him a sword?

He sits at the feet of the king as a 'thyle', or spokesman. Beowulf retorts that everyone knows this man killed his own brothers.

To which rival did the young Beowulf lose a famous swimming match?

The rival is described as ruler of the Brondings and turns up in another Old English catalogue poem of kings and peoples.

What happens to the giant's sword Beowulf uses to kill Grendel's mother?

Only the hilt survives, and Beowulf carries it back to Hrothgar along with Grendel's severed head.

Which sword, an heirloom of Hrothgar's family, is among the gifts he gives Beowulf?

It later fails Beowulf against the dragon: it snaps when he strikes, according to the poem, because his arm is too strong for any blade.

Beowulf swims home from Frisia carrying how many sets of armour, a feat showing his strength?

Scholars from Adrien Bonjour onwards read digressions like this one as deliberate comparisons with the main plot rather than random detours.

Which king, Beowulf's lord, led a raid on Frisia around 521 also recorded by Gregory of Tours?

Gregory calls him Chlochilaicus, and says the Franks displayed his enormous corpse as a curiosity. It is one of the few points where the poem touches datable history.

Roughly how many years does Beowulf reign as king before the dragon appears?

The poem's structure has often been read as a contrast between the young hero and the old king, a division Tolkien thought was its heart.

What wakes the dragon's fury in the final part of the poem?

Tolkien borrowed the theft-of-a-cup episode for Bilbo in The Hobbit, and rated this dragon and Fáfnir the only two 'real dragons' in northern literature.

Which young kinsman is the only companion who does not flee, helping Beowulf kill the dragon?

His name means 'remnant of valour', and he is Beowulf's only living relative at the end. He bitterly rebukes the men who ran.

What do Beowulf's people do with his body after his death?

The mound is built to be visible from the sea. The poem opens with a funeral too, so it begins and ends with one.

The poem opens with the funeral of which legendary Danish king, once a boat-borne foundling?

His body is laid in a ship surrounded by treasure and pushed out to sea, echoing the way he arrived. The name means 'Shield, son of Sheaf'.

What is the name of Hrothgar's queen, who passes the cup around the hall and is 'Lady of the Helmings'?

She is of the Wulfing clan and mother of Hrethric, Hrothmund and Freawaru. Some scholars link the Wulfings to East Anglia's Wuffing dynasty.

In the poem, Beowulf's fight with Grendel takes place in which country?

The whole story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 5th and 6th centuries and features almost no English characters, despite being written in Old English.

Weohstan, father of the loyal young warrior at the dragon fight, belonged to which people?

The son is even called a Scylfing, a metonym for Swede, because the Scylfings were Sweden's ruling clan. Weohstan won his sword by killing the rebel prince Eanmund.

The name Beowulf may be a kenning, 'bee-wolf', a poetic word for which animal?

The philologist Henry Sweet proposed the reading. A bear raids hives for honey, and Beowulf famously fights with a bear-hug grip rather than a sword.

'Whale-road' (hronrad), a famous compound from the opening lines of Beowulf, is a kenning for what?

Old English poets also called it swan-road and sail-road. Kennings are a signature device of the poem's heavily formulaic style.

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript. What is it called?

It takes its name from the 16th-century antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose name is written on its first page. It sits in the British Library.

In which year was the Beowulf manuscript damaged by a fire at Ashburnham House in London?

The house was storing Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval manuscripts. Charred edges have kept crumbling ever since, taking letters with them.

The Beowulf manuscript is 'A.XV' in which emperor's press of Sir Robert Cotton's library?

Cotton labelled his shelves by the busts on top of each press: 'A.XV' means the fifteenth book on the top shelf of that case.

How many scribes copied the Beowulf manuscript?

The handwriting changes after line 1939. The second scribe copied more conservatively, preserving archaic spellings that help scholars date the poem.

Which Old English poem, by the scribe who finished Beowulf, follows it in the manuscript?

Wormholes in the last leaves of Beowulf that do not continue into the next text suggest Beowulf once ended the volume.

Which Icelandic scholar made the first transcriptions of the Beowulf manuscript in 1786?

His edition, ready by 1807, was destroyed when the British bombarded Copenhagen and burned his house. He finally published it in 1815, and one modern scholar has called him 'essentially a fraud' for its errors.

The first complete printed Beowulf, published in 1815, was translated into which language?

Grundtvig reviewed it that year and produced the first complete verse translation, in Danish, in 1820. John Mitchell Kemble's literal English version came in 1837.

To which body did Tolkien deliver his 1936 lecture 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics'?

It was the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture. He argued that scholars had been quarrying the poem as a historical document while ignoring its power as poetry.

Tolkien's 1926 prose translation of Beowulf was finally published in which year?

His son Christopher edited it, adding the unpublished story 'Sellic Spell' and two versions of 'The Lay of Beowulf'.

Which Nobel-winning poet's 1999 verse translation of Beowulf won the Whitbread Book of the Year?

Critics nicknamed it 'Heaneywulf'. He dedicated the book to the memory of Ted Hughes, and it went into the Norton Anthology of English Literature.

The 1999 Whitbread-winning translation controversially rendered the poem's first word 'Hwæt!' as which English word?

He linked it to the speech of his Ulster relatives. Maria Dahvana Headley went further in 2020 with 'Bro!', and her version won a Hugo Award.

Which American author's 1971 novel Grendel retells the story from the monster's point of view?

Gardner said he wanted to run through the main ideas of Western civilisation 'in the voice of the monster'. It became an animated film, Grendel Grendel Grendel, in 1981.

Who directed the 2007 motion-capture film Beowulf, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary?

He had used the same technique on The Polar Express and Monster House. The film grossed $196.4 million and was screened in 3D in over 1,000 theatres.

In the 2007 film, who voiced and performed Grendel's mother?

Crispin Glover played Grendel and Ray Winstone the hero. Zemeckis cast Winstone after seeing him as Henry VIII on ITV.

Who played the title role in the 2005 film Beowulf & Grendel, shot in Iceland?

Stellan Skarsgård played Hrothgar and Sarah Polley a witch named Selma. The Canadian-Icelandic co-production was directed by Sturla Gunnarsson.

The 13th Warrior (1999) is based on which Michael Crichton novel that reworks Beowulf?

Banderas plays the real 10th-century traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan, dragged along with a dozen Norsemen to fight the Wendol.

Which actor played Beowulf in the 1999 film set in a post-apocalyptic, techno-feudal future?

One critic said it owed more to Mad Max than Beowulf. Rhona Mitra co-starred as Kyra and Grendel's mother was played by Layla Roberts.

Which famous ship burial leads some scholars to place Beowulf's composition at Rendlesham in East Anglia?

The East Anglian royal Wuffingas may have descended from the Geatish Wulfings. Others date the poem anywhere from the 8th century to the early 11th.

Digs at Lejre, seat of Hrothgar's Scyldings, found halls from which century, matching the poem's setting?

Three halls each about 50 metres long were uncovered in digs in 1986-88 and 2004-05, centuries before the poem was written down.

The surviving Beowulf manuscript was produced between which years?

When the poem itself was composed is hotly disputed; Tolkien argued for the 8th century, others for a date close to the manuscript.

Which Old English poem also names Hrothgar, his nephew Hrothulf and their enemy Ingeld?

It reads like a travelling poet's catalogue of kings and peoples, and it fills in the end of Hrothgar's feud with Ingeld, which Beowulf leaves hanging.

Which 2018 Maria Dahvana Headley novel reimagines Beowulf in suburban America, focused on the monster's mother?

Two years later Headley published her own translation, the one that opens with 'Bro!' and won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

Beowulf is written mostly in which dialect of Old English?

Traces of other dialects suggest a long, complex transmission across England before the surviving copy was made around 975 to 1025.

The Norse tale of Hrolf Kraki, often compared with Beowulf, features which bear-shapeshifter?

Scholars have also linked the poem to the Icelandic Grettis saga, the international Bear's Son Tale and the Irish folktale of the Hand and the Child.

To which part of the Bible are all of Beowulf's scriptural references confined?

Christ is never mentioned; the poem is set in pagan times and every character whose belief we learn of is a pagan, though its scribes were certainly Christian.

After roughly how many lines does the Beowulf manuscript's handwriting switch to a second scribe?

The first scribe broke off mid-sentence; he had carefully regularised spellings into common West Saxon, while the second wrote more vigorously and less tidily.