by Cherian Zachariah
Beowulf spoke and made a formal boast for the last time: “I risked my life often when I was young; now I am old. As king of the people, I shall pursue this fight for the glory of winning, if the evil one will abandon his fort and face me in the open.”
Then he addressed his companions one final time – those fighters in their helmets and high-born: “I would not use a weapon if I knew another way to grapple with the dragon and make good my boast against Grendel in days gone by.
—
I read ‘Beowulf’ in school. More accurately, I was forced to read ‘Beowulf’ in school. It’s been a few decades since that English class, but I remember the teacher speaking about the epic poem: The titular character fights and is victorious over Grendel who is terrorizing the Danes in their mead-hall of Heorot. Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother who seeks revenge for Grendel’s death. Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and grows old.
My teacher spoke of themes that didn’t mean much to a young man with life and its endless possibilities before him. The Danes shelter in Heorot, seeking refuge against Grendel’s depredations, but fear of the unknown didn’t mean much to someone who was eager to go to a military academy. Grendel is a descendant of Cain, destined to live in the dark corners of the world – celebrations and noise anger him, but the plight of the outsider was a concept foreign to a young man who’d just gained acceptance to a tribe.
I put the epic poem aside and didn’t give it another thought for decades. I went to college, I graduated. I went to sea, went to graduate school, got married, became a dad, bought a house and put down roots. The kids grew up and suddenly, my son was on his way to college and my daughter was a senior.
Listening to a podcast one day, the host quoted a line from ‘Beowulf’ and a long-distant classroom memory stirred. I no longer had a hardcopy of the poem, but audibooks are wonderful things, so I downloaded and listened to the Seamus Heaney translation. The first half of the poem was as I remembered it: Hrothgar, the Danes, Grendel, Grendel’s mother.
The second half, however, was undiscovered country. Beowulf is king of the Geats, but fifty years have passed since his fight with Grendel’s mother. A dragon, angered at the theft of a golden cup from his lair, is terrorizing the kingdom. Beowulf goes into the dragon’s lair to do battle, but is outmatched. His companions see this and, fearing for their lives, retreat into nearby woods. Only one man, Wiglaf, comes to his aid. Together, they slay the dragon, but Beowulf, mortally wounded in the fight, dies.
The young man that I was had paid scant attention to the second half of the poem. The older man asks, “What if the poem is really about this theme: Once having slain monsters, we spend our lives trying to live up to that reputation?”
—
How do we avoid Beowulf’s fate?
I’m not speaking of avoiding death; last I checked, the mortality rate was 100%. I am speaking of avoiding yearning for glory long passed – real or imagined. Beowulf fights monsters as a young man and believes those acts are what define him, so he rides out as an old man to repeat them. He sees the latter part of his life – everything after the events of Heorot – as a decline, so feels compelled to repeat the comfort of the known, the thing that brought him greatness in his youth.
If the first part of our lives is our “warrior mode” where “we need to prove to ourselves and others that we can accomplish something big”, then the second part can be both about comfort with the achievements of the first part as well as knowing that we don’t have to spend fifty years waiting for the next monster to fight. More specifically, we don’t have to wait for the exact same type of challenge to come along for us to remain significant.
In the context of the Beowulf problem: What if Beowulf, instead of waiting for the next monster to come along, taught others to fight them? How would the story end if all ten companions he took with him had gone forward without hesitation?
These are the questions that I’m about to grapple with: I’ve slain dragons (okay, metaphorically) – and I’m not quite sure how I’ll navigate to that place where I’m comfortable being something other than what I was.
Cherian Zachariah, a 1993 graduate of the U. S. Coast Guard Academy, is now a dad and husband, living the startup dream in the San Francisco Bay Area. When possible, he spends time surfing with his son in Santa Barbara County.
This article was re-published with the author’s permission, with minor modifications. The original Substack post can be viewed here.
